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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

Can technology help engage employees in their overall wellbeing?

According to a piece in the recent USA Today supplement Future of Health Care, “With the ongoing trend toward digitization in health care, employers are looking to emerging technologies to improve quality of care.”

The piece states: “Incorporating emerging technologies linked to wellness programs and health coaches, for example, can result in improved productivity, less absenteeism and reduced health care costs. Identifying an individual's health risk is crucial as part of an overall strategy, along with helping him or her understand those risks and assisting the employee in making the necessary change.”

Says Interactive Health Chief Information Officer Tim Hardy: “Technology is a tool, not a panacea. We must be careful about having an over-reliance on technology. The wave of new apps and technology can cause us to think that the technology alone will cause individuals to make changes. Utilizing technology to enable individuals and make it easier to make change is important, but it must go beyond that. Having a variety of modalities to deliver those resources is also extremely important.”

Of course, as technology increasingly gets integrated into corporate wellness programs, data privacy requirements necessarily must become a greater part of the overall focus.

Hardy adds: “There must be a higher and higher premium on security of information. Without question, there absolutely have to be strong security controls, encryption, etc. Providers of technology must understand they're holding these individuals' personal health information, and they have to regard it as such. It's crucial to understand this, and make sure all safeguards are in place.”

The piece also quotes  Rose Stanley, senior practice leader at the nonprofit human resources association WorldatWork, “We live in a world where security concerns are real, and we must go into that with that knowledge. Having very reputable organizations that are either the ones that created the technology and/or the organizations offering the technology for use to their employees is paramount. However, there are no guarantees. Diligence and constant protection of privacy should be a mainstay of any strategy.”

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