80% of Employers Plan to Use Financial Incentives to Encourage Participation Wellness Programs by 2012

Eager to lower healthcare costs, employers are increasingly looking to incentives as a way to encourage their employees to improve their health.    According to a recent study by the National Business Group on Health, the use of financial incentives in wellness programs increased by 50% from 2009 to 2011.  By 2012, 80% of companies will be using financial incentives to get their employees to engage in wellness programs.

We are strong supporters of incentives here at incentaHEALTH (hence the name!), but we have taken a slightly different strategy for rewarding health.  Instead of providing incentives just for joining a wellness program, we believe in offering incentives based on long term behavior change that can be measured without relying on self-reported data.  This leads to a more dedicated group of participants in our programs, which is a win-win for both the employee and the employer.  Read more here about how we have combined our patented HEALTHspot kiosk with push-based coaching tools to help thousands of employees improve their health while helping their employers generate a positive return on investment for their wellness program.

[via USAToday]

NPR Popcorn Portion Size Example

For instance, take a look at this comparison of movie theater popcorn sizes.  Portion distortion is one of the recurring skills that we spend a lot of time coaching our incentaHEALTH participants on.  For most people in the U.S. it’s impossible to go throughout the day and not be faced with at least one 0versized meal option.  Learning simple ways to successfully navigate these challenges is a key to the long term success we’re seeing with our customers.

Obesity Trends Infographic from NPR.org

Here is a link to the min-site they have set up around obesity.

When it comes to managing your weight, 570 calories is a big deal.  To put 570 calories in perspective, consider that a pound of fat is 3,500 calories.  So if you eat 500 extra calories a day for seven days, you will theoretically add a pound to your body weight.   That’s why in the incentaHEALTH wellness program we coach our participants on the power of reducing their daily caloric intake by 250 calories combined with the addition of 250 calories of physical activity per day.  This creates a 500 calorie deficit instead of a surplus.  The result is one pound of weight loss per week.  The exact opposite of eating an extra 500 calories a day.  Simple choices can have big impacts over time!

You can read more about the study in the June edition of the journal PLoS Medicine, published by the Public Library of Science.

CNN has a nice interview with Barry Popkin, the lead researcher on the study from the University of North Carolina.

The principles stressed by the new “My Plate” model are much more useful in that they are simple things that you can do every time you eat.  For instance:

• Fill half your plate with fruit and veggies
• Avoid oversized portions
• Make at least 1/2 your grains whole grains
• Choose water instead of sugary drinks
• Balance your food choices with your activity level

Here at incentaHEALTH we are very pleased to see the use of a plate instead of the old food pyramid.  In fact, we’ve been using the plate model in our daily email coaching to our participants for the last 8 years.  Take a look at the similarity!

USDA My Plate "New Pyramid" and the incentaHEALTH Plate

You can access all of the new materials about the My Plate tool here.

Here is a nice commentary directly from the USDA’s blog on the new plate.

American Public Health Association

Our partners over at Kaiser Permanente submitted an application to have the Weigh and Win program highlighted at the 13th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association.  We are excited to announce that our program has been selected!

Weigh and Win is the first community-based application of the incentaHEALTH wellness platform.  The program is collaboration between Kaiser Permanente’s Community Benefit group and incentaHEALTH.

The objective of the program is to engage the citizens of Colorado in a measurable program that pays people for achieving a healthy weight.

We’ve installed about a dozen HEALTHspot kiosks across the state to privately measure outcomes without having to use self-reported data.  As of this morning, we have about 3,000 people already signed up and the weight loss tally so far is 3,415 pounds and counting!

Click here to read about the session.

200 Series HEALTHspot Wellness Kiosk

You can read more about the conference here.

Take a look at this chart from Comscore depicting where consumers in the UK are spending their time while on their smart phones.

UK Mobile Site Popularity

The Wall Street Journal ran a story this morning about Facebook and how they’re expanding in ways that will drive people to spend more and more time on Facebook.  It’s clear that Facebook is popular, and growing more so as time goes on.  The power of Facebook is that it becomes more valuable as more people use it.  It’s success will lead to more success, ad infinitum.  This leads me back to the post’s headline:

How does Facebook relate to wellness?

Since one of the key principles of wellness is behavior change, it’s apparent that the social nature of products like Facebook can be harnessed to help people become more successful as they try to improve their health.  We are working on some new social media enhancements to incentaHEALTH’s wellness program.  I’ll share these new tools with you soon.

In the meantime, drop me a line at tmcguire@incentahealth.com and let me know how you see social media helping, or hurting, wellness.

Researchers found that the current annual cost of $273B will rise to $818B by 2030.  The silver lining in the findings is that a substantial portion of the cost increase is related to unhealthy behaviors, which can be corrected.

“Unhealthy behaviors and unhealthy environments have contributed to a tidal wave of risk factors among many Americans,” said Nancy Brown, American Heart Association CEO. “Early intervention and evidence-based public policies are absolute musts to significantly reduce alarming rates of obesity, hypertension, tobacco use and cholesterol levels.”

The full story can be found on the American Heart Association’s web site.

Obesity costs on the rise

A recent analysis of the costs associated with overweight and obesity has found the the total annual cost in North America to be $300B.  The research found that the costs are largely driven by four primary areas:

1. Increased medical care
2. Loss of worker productivity
3. Higher death rates
4. Increases in worker disability

The study is titled “Obesity and its Relation to Mortality and Morbidity Costs.“  The analysis was performed by the Society of Actuaries.

You can read the full report here.

The current issue of Portfolio is showcasing alumni in technology. McGuire —who graduated from the University of Colorado in 1994 in Organizational Management and Information Systems—started incentaHEALTH as part of a vision to apply cutting edge technology to the issue of rising healthcare costs. For McGuire, it’s a natural combination of three driving passions: business, technology and health (McGuire is also a Certified Personal Trainer who competes in marathons and triathlons to stay in shape).

McGuire and his business partner Jack Rule designed and developed a health care screening kiosk for the workplace and a technology-based behavior change system (delivered by a daily e-mail and text messages) that gets employees of a company to improve their health using incentives. McGuire was awarded patents in the United States and Australia for remote biometric monitoring systems and data visualization technologies.

Business leaders want bottom line results for their investment in corporate wellness programs. “We can save an employer over $1,000 per year in obesity-related costs for each successful employee we engage in our wellness program.”

The full interview can be viewed online via the LEEDS website.  The story is on pages 16 and 17.