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How do you know if your wellness program is effective?

After lack of employee participation, wellness program customers cite inadequate reporting as the reason they were dissatisfied with a program. Many purchasers of wellness programs dive in without having fully defined the problems they are trying to solve. As a result, the reporting they receive doesn’t seem to directly measure progress against the change within their workforce that they had hoped to create.

Goals

Before you decide that a wellness program is the right tool to address your challenges — and certainly before you select a specific wellness platform — you must define the specific problems you want to solve. Success is usually viewed as reduction in employee health costs and, more specifically, a reduction in medical claims. However, it is important to recognize that workforce participation in a wellness program could cause costs to increase the first year as more employees will likely be driven to check-ups and wellness visits that are key to preventive care.

This initial increase in cost and utilization is an important step toward preventing more significant longer-term costs. As a result, clients should count on committing to a wellness program for at least two years before judging its effectiveness or concluding that it has not been successful.

Data and Evaluation

To help clients define their goals, WellSpark starts by first asking this key question:
“What situation exists today that you want to tackle, and how will it look one year from now when a wellness program addresses it successfully?”

With that question answered, WellSpark can craft and deliver reporting that is targeted, tailored, and focused on measuring progress against achieving intended change. From the extensive and comprehensive metrics collected for all programs, WellSpark can select and share data that is the most relevant, meaningful, and actionable for clients.

How does WellSpark demonstrate ROI?

Many wellness programs offer participation levels as their performance guarantee, absent any demonstration of how that participation impacted employee health costs, absenteeism, or productivity. Other programs offer reporting that ties more directly to health care cost savings, such as claims data, lowering A1C, weight loss, or even further-downstream impact such as reduced absenteeism. In these cases, the assumed conclusion is lowered cost. However, this cost reduction is viewed in aggregate per month across the entire employee population and does not reveal how participation averted cost
originating with any single employee.

The ROI model, which is return on dollars already spent, is more akin to care management which should be taking place with employees who are already sick, making implementation of a wellness program too late. Instead, WellSpark pursues a Future Cost Avoidance (FCA) approach, which aims to solve for
emerging risk. The goal is not to reduce cost but avoid it altogether by reaching employees who have the potential to cost a company the most versus those who already are. When applied to WellSpark, the “I” in ROI is an investment in avoiding spend versus trying to manage them later.

Ultimately, you are highly likely to see outcomes that lead to meaningful engagement and real future cost avoidance if you: clearly define the problem(s) you are trying to solve, deploy recommended engagement tactics and strategies, and give a program enough time to mature.

Learn more about how to select the right wellness program for your organization.

Cost is more than price tag. It’s also about evaluating a program’s ability to engage and target the employees who can benefit most from better wellbeing.

The cost of wellness programs varies widely but generally are on the rise. According to a pre-COVID-19 pandemic 2020 study published by Business Group on Health, wellness programs have seen a 36% increase in cost. Typically, companies spend between $3 and $7 per employee per month ($36 – $84 annually) for a wellness platform, many of which include at least some level of health coaching. Scale can lower the per-employee cost of a wellness program, as companies with more employees usually see a lower cost-per-individual.

Average Cost Comparison for Wellness Programs

Standard Program Elements	Industry Average Low	Industry Average High	WellSpark Average
Digital wellness platform + app (annually, per employee)	$36	$84	$45
Incentives and rewards, such as gift cards (annually, per employee)	$40	$75	$50
Individual health coaching sessions (per session)	$50	$350	$120
Biometric screenings (per screening)	$40	$75	$55

Additional costs associated with implementing a wellness program might be:

• Incentives: To drive program participation, employers might fund incentives and rewards, often in the form of gift cards or lower health insurance premiums.
• Coaching: More individualized coaching and support is often offered for an additional fee, charged either per session or per month.
• Events and Activities: Hosting wellness fairs or biometric screening events aid participation. Biometric screenings, for example, may cost between $40 and $75 per person.

These costs do not include extra customization, strategy and support, or individualized coaching services you may seek.  In many cases, employers may choose to purchase an additional single-point solution, such as those offering diabetes management or mental health support services.

How is WellSpark Priced?

WellSpark seeks to offer clients a cost advantage that reflects actual participation levels. For the first year of the WellSpark program, when engagement is typically lower, customers usually opt not to pay “full freight” but rather only for their employees who actually participate, along with a low “per employee per month” rate for access to WellSpark‘s digital support tools. Then, as participation increases, WellSpark applies guardrails to prevent unpredictable expense increases resulting from greater employee use of the program.

WellSpark’s program consists of three core components:

1. Digital platform with accompanying app
2. Personal health assessments and educational content
3. Coaching

With WellSpark, companies of up to 2,000 employees can expect to spend $70 to $135 annually per employee, not inclusive of incentives or rewards. The more employees an organization has, the lower the cost per employee will be. WellSpark consultants work closely with clients to recommend the option that makes the most financial sense for achieving company wellness goals.

Learn more about how to select the right wellness program for your organization.

Cost, time and effectiveness are the factors to consider

Maybe you’ve decided that it’s time to try a wellness program to address factors that are negatively influencing the happiness, stability, and expenses related to the health of your workforce. The success of your business relies on employees who are focused on their work, show up consistently and reliably for your organization, and whose health doesn’t impose avoidable medical expenses and insurance claims. The behavioral changes that underpin these issues are what wellness programs are designed to affect. But, how do you know you’re choosing the right program—that will drive the change you’re looking for—and not investing in a wellness program that will miss the mark, not earn attention and participation from your workforce, and ultimately be yet another expense on top of the ones you had hoped to overcome?

Three key criteria should drive your research and comparison of wellness programs, and ultimately the choice you make: the cost, time and effort you must invest to earn employee interest and participation, and ultimately the results.

Cost
At this point, wellness programs appear to be a commodity. So many options are available that seemingly offer the same features, do the same thing, and are designed to deliver the same results. Shopping for the best price may seem like the logical approach to guide your selection process. But, how much you spend on a wellness program isn’t the only thing that determines the smartness of your decision. Rather, it’s whether you choose a program designed to address the issues you believe are at the core of where improvement is possible, especially among the employees you feel are most responsible for the challenges you want to overcome. Learn more about how cost should guide your wellness program choice.

Time investment
After you’ve chosen a wellness program to implement, the real work begins, which is driving adoption and engagement from your employees. A program can’t be successful if it doesn’t earn participation from the employees who will most benefit from it. When considering which wellness program to commit to, it’s important to understand what responsibility—meaning time and effort—you and your team will need to devote to crafting and delivering the activities and communications required to earn employee participation.

Evaluating effectiveness
Feeling confident that a wellness program offers a mechanism for measuring and demonstrating achievement of intended results is the most important factor among your decision-making criteria. Ultimately, being able to showcase positive results will determine whether your choice and implementation of a wellness program is viewed as a success, failure, smart investment, or waste of resources. The essential first step is yours, which is evaluating your organization’s challenges and identifying exactly where you feel wellness program intervention is needed, and how the circumstances that reflect the collective wellness of your workforce will look different if a program has done its job. For that to be possible, a wellness program must come with reporting that offers the visibility you need. Learn more about how to evaluate the effectiveness of your wellness program is effective.

Where does WellSpark fit in among wellness programs?
WellSpark is for clients seeking a holistic, integrated wellness program to drive cultural shift within a workforce, not just target a single health issue.

WellSpark focuses on a variety of measures, including disease distress and forward-looking “future cost avoidance” rather than return-on-investment, which is a measure of past performance. WellSpark seeks to reach employees who are not yet part of the “sick care” system but who have the potential to become costly members in the future if no intervention is taken.

Your healthiest most wellness-conscious employees will jump at the chance to participate in a program. But they are the ones you least need to reach and influence. To impact change where it is needed, you need to reach and engage employees who ignore or resist participation. It’s not the largest potential participation that will drive the results you need, it’s participation from those who present the greatest barrier to achieving results, and who are usually the ones most difficult to reach and engage. That’s where WellSpark’s boutique, consultative, and customizable approach truly delivers.

Holistic versus single-point solution wellness programs
Although wellness programs come in variety of forms and are delivered through multiple modalities, one distinguishing factor can help in your research, evaluation, and decision among programs. If a program is a single-point-solution, it aims to address one health concern, such as prevention or management of diabetes. So, if you have identified more than one health or wellness issue to tackle with your workforce, you may need to consider more than one solution. In contrast, holistic programs, WellSpark being one example, consider biological, psychological, and social dimensions of a person’s health to address the whole wellness picture.

Let WellSpark help you determine what type of wellness program is the best fit for your organization. Contact us today.