Five Ways to Connect, Measure, and Achieve
Improved Population Health
By Justin Bellante
Create a wellness program to connect with your member
population, measure individual and group health metrics, and
empower people to achieve their health-improvement goals.
Americans are increasingly enthusiastic about wellness. We know that our lifestyle
choices impact our health and many of us are taking positive steps to prevent chronic diseases. For example, 70 percent of respondents to a recent Harris Poll said that
“making personal health changes” was their top current health priority and 34 percent of them said that preventive care was “the most important characteristic of
quality” in the health care system.1
For individuals, preventive care typically involves visiting a doctor for regular checkups and going to a lab for annual blood work. But these routine activities become
much more difficult to manage when they involve a large population—whether its
employees within a corporation, patients in an accountable care organization, or
members of a health plan. Wellness programs for these groups continue to grow
in popularity. However, to be effective, wellness administrators need technology
to automate repetitive functions, manage the consumer experience, as well as to
exchange health data among participating wellness vendors, healthcare providers,
and health plans.
1. 2014 Transamerica Center for Health Studies Survey
If your organization has a wellness program, ask yourself these questions:
• How well automated is our wellness program?
• Do we have a technology platform to streamline the health measurement and
improvement process?
• Do we define success by simple participation or by demonstrable outcomes?
• Have we systematized the exchange of electronic health records among wellness
vendors?
Here are five proven techniques for automating your wellness program, improving
the health of your population, and generating positive returns on your wellness
investments.
Design a Great User Experience
Health screening is the foundation of today’s wellness programs. Biometric tests and
health risk assessments (HRAs) provide a baseline for measuring improvement. But
you need to make it easy for participants to sign up, schedule appointments, get
screened, check results, and take the right steps towards better health. Today’s consumers insist on user-friendly experiences for navigating healthcare processes. This
implies technology that can move their data securely between systems as well as
help them navigate those systems.
Start with convenience. The most successful wellness programs offer several methods for gathering biometric data. Participants can choose to order an at-home test
kit, attend an onsite-screening event, confer with their personal physicians, or visit
a nearby pharmacy or lab. That’s where technology comes in. Regardless of which
method they choose, they should enjoy a cohesive experience for ordering tests,
scheduling appointments, receiving reminders, and viewing results. They should receive intuitive lab reports that contain interactive charts and graphs so it is easy to
monitor year-over-year trends.
By providing a seamless and positive user experience, a wellness technology platform will increase member engagement. It should also make it easy to navigate
healthcare processes, whether it’s scheduling a lab appointment or following up
with a caregiver. It should offer secure, personal health dashboards for each participant, along with program management dashboards that enable administrators
to monitor the progress of the population as a whole. All of these front-end assets
should be designed for mobile phones, tablets, and computers.
Shift from Activities to Outcomes
Until recently, wellness programs were focused mainly on maximizing participation
in annual health screening services and other wellness activities. Once administrators have helped their populations achieve higher engagement levels, they need to
shift their focus to improving health outcomes.
Outcomes-based wellness programs not only require participation; they also require
individuals to achieve specific goals and health metrics. To easily execute these programs, wellness administrators need to be able to track activities, rewards, and incentives. They also need to verify that participants have made the appropriate “next
steps,” which often involve interventions supplied by other wellness vendors.
Your wellness technology platform should connect biometric screening results with
individual risk profiles, and also make recommendations for each participant. For
example, if a participant has borderline lab results and moderate risk factors, the system might suggest a follow-up appointment with a health coach or enrollment in a
diet/weight loss program. In more extreme instances, the participant might be directed to a disease management program or prescription drug compliance program. All
of these handoffs should be automatic, and the data should move with the patient.
Use Incentives to Motivate Behavioral Change
Rewards and incentives are the key to encouraging positive change. According to the
Harris Poll cited above, 74 percent of Americans surveyed said they value a health
care system that directly incentivizes healthy behavior through cash payouts or insurance premium discounts.
During the first year of this type of wellness program, participants might earn monetary incentives simply by completing the screenings and wellness activities. In subsequent years, incentives can be based on whether their lab results fall within the
healthy range. Employees might lower their health care premiums by passing a cotinine test, which proves that they are tobacco-free, and by keeping their glucose
and cholesterol levels in check. In essence, employees should be incentivized for
staying healthy.
Connect People to Targeted Interventions
The primary thrust of a wellness program is to empower people to monitor vital
health metrics and prevent chronic health conditions such as diabetes, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease. Tracking these metrics over time—and matching that
data with relevant experiences—becomes the basis for achieving health improvement goals, both for individuals and for the member population.
Eighty five percent of employers believe that implementing wellness and disease
management programs leads to better control of health care costs.2 But you need to
automate these processes and orchestrate the handoffs so people know what to do
next. A good wellness technology platform delivers targeted recommendations to
each participant, including education curricula, health coaching, and participation
in disease management programs.
Some wellness companies are good at analyzing and managing data. Others are
good at managing the user experience. You need a platform that can coordinate
both if you want to successfully move people through complex healthcare processes.
Enable Interoperability Among Stakeholders
This brings us to one of the most important ingredients of a wellness platform: a
versatile hub for securely managing and exchanging health data. Most employers
procure services from multiple wellness vendors. However, less then one quarter of
these vendors share wellness data among themselves to increase program effectiveness.3 That leaves a lot of manual work for wellness administrators, and also results
in many unanswered questions for participants.
Data management technology is the answer. Your wellness technology platform
should collect wellness data from biometric screening programs and health risk assessments, create electronic health records, and pass pertinent data to appropriate constituents including physicians, health coaches, exchanges, health plans, and
health services companies. The data management layer is the most important part
of the platform, and it must adhere to all pertinent security regulations, such as the
HIPAA guidelines governing personally identifiable information. The platform should
also generate aggregate program data so that wellness administrators can monitor
population health trends and design better wellness programs in the future. These
aggregate reports must preserve individual privacy, yet offer enough insight on an
2. Transamerica Center, op. cit.
3. BioIQ Wellness Trends survey (December 2014).
aggregated basis to enable employers to make adjustments to their health coverage
and wellness incentives.
In addition, the backend connections must be orchestrated by a technology platform that ensures a fluid interchange of wellness data among all pertinent stakeholders. The data hub should support prevailing standards for gathering health data,
managing that data to ensure it meets industry-accepted formats, and moving the
data securely among stakeholders. The participant experiences and the corresponding data should always be in sync.
Conclusion
To make wellness programs work, you must be able to engage members, track rewards/incentives, and monitor progress. A complete wellness technology platform
connects people to measurement solutions, integrates lab results, and verifies outcomes. It serves as the central hub for sharing data, driving participation, and tracking wellness measures. Most importantly, it enables individuals to play an active role
in their own care by monitoring vital health metrics. These activities are the foundation of good health, both for individuals and populations.
About the Author
Justin Bellante is the chief executive officer at BioIQ, a healthcare technology company based in Santa Barbara, California. Since the company’s inception in 2005, he
has helped guide BioIQ from initial concept to well-established company. He has solidified corporate direction and strategic partnerships, developed the BioIQ wellness
technology solution, and built a culture that is passionate about innovation in healthcare. Today, thousands of employers and some of the nation’s largest health plans
use BioIQ’s mature technology platform to measure individual and population health,
manage health data, and improve compliance with healthcare quality standards.
Prior to joining BioIQ, Mr. Bellante developed novel materials and testing platforms
for Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) while pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was also a researcher in the Radiation and Reliability Physics organization at the Sandia National Laboratory and at the Microfabrication Facility within Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
Please visit www.bioiq.com to learn more.
You can also contact (888) 818-1594 or [email protected] for a demonstration.