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Cathy Kenworthy, CEO of Interactive Health

USA Today ran a special Employee Well-being Issue, much of which focused on the intersection of technology and workplace wellness.

One expert who weighed in was Interactive Health CEO Cathy Kenworthy, who tackled the question of how technology helps improve the effectiveness of wellness programs?

Said Kenworthy: “Technology does a fantastic job of opening up new engagement opportunities, particularly in the context of well-designed preventive care programs. Using technology, we can design solutions that are very effective at tapping into key segments of a given population to truly understand health risk in specific and credible ways. More importantly, we can take action based on this information more quickly than in the past, engaging individuals sooner to create improved outcomes.”

Indeed, beyond the ways that data can improve individual approaches, Kenworthy further discussed how data can help with a company's entire health plan design: “Wellness is often viewed as a part of the health plan. In reality, it is a catalyst for better health plan design. Successful companies leverage wellness to make health plans better. Using wellness data as a catalyst to create a better health plan design creates empowerment for employers as well as employees.”

“By analyzing wellness data, employers can create a better health plan design to address health risks most prevalent within their employee base and those with the most adverse effects on their business success. For example, aggregate wellness data may show a high risk for diabetes, along with a high percentage of employees with diabetes who are not taking medication due to co-pay cost. Employers who analyze this data see the opportunity to change the health plan design to reduce or eliminate co-pays for diabetes maintenance medication. Knowledge of health risk creates the opportunity to act upon it and create better health plan design with more access, more options and lower cost.”