Fitmatic: Blog - Health Assessments - Unboxing Biometrics

Health Assessments - Unboxing Biometrics

Ticking off the annual physical with biometric screening has become a routine ritual at a growing number of organizations. Nearly every wellness provider offers these popular programs, and tout screenings as an essential key wellness metrics in a rosy bouquet of projected health cost savings.

Legislation also supports you rewarding your employees for the basics: test, report, reward. That's what comes in the box, and ought to drive significant results, year after year. And this packaged program is usually managed by a vendor who handles the details: test, report, reward. But once the rewards have been distributed, what comes next?

Some vendors do a bit more: emailing healthy reminders, discount wellness offerings, or additional health articles to assist on next steps. But it often ends there. Generic offerings may only help a small group of self-motivated employees. The rest? Perhaps turned off by a one-size-fits-all approach - and sees the weekly or monthly email bulletin on health as a routine condemnation of their stagnation, rather than support of some change, any change.

How can you engage employees effectively beyond the basics?

With a smarter approach. A tailored and personalized approach that helps your staff springboard a short visit with their physician into changes they'll want to make. An individual's quest doesn't stop after the reward is issued. But where do they find the guidance they want and need?

We empower your employees to put that handful of numbers on their assessment into context. Share guidance and information to engage them gently. Make change seem like an easy choice instead of a confusing and insurmountable challenge. Tailored engagement guiding them, as deep or lightly as they prefer, encourages better habits and can lead to small behavior changes.

When you go beyond the biometric screening boxes, you expand the opportunities to guide your workforce on a journey of improved health. We help you encourage results that do more than expand baseline participation rates. Your employees benefit from improved health outcomes.

Why aren't health screenings doing more for you?

A biometric screening appointment runs about fifteen minutes long. Add on a full physical, and you have a bit more time with your health practitioner to get into more details. You go over your results, get a brief on what you need to adjust (if anything), and you're done for the year. Professional, courteous, efficient, and you walk out with a signed proof of visit form, your numbers, maybe some suggestions, or a treatment plan (if needed).

Your health professional goes on to their next patient. They use years of medical school and decades of medical science during another brief, efficient visit. They don't do it alone; they have an office full of professionals supporting a well-organized system. A system that allows a single Doctor to manage the health and lives of ninety or more patients a week, thousands of patients a year. Often, patients not in need of immediate interventions leave with a page or two of information that gives a snapshot of themselves, their health, and their human potential at that moment in time.

At the end of a wellness appointment, these personalized sheaves of paper and a few words of advice are the end.

As an HR professional, you may see similar snapshots of human potential every day - a well thought out resume. But to you, this represents the beginning. The start of a path for potential. One or two pages of resume, hundreds of resumes per week, thousands per year. Your team spends a practiced amount of time reading, absorbing, assessing. You use your years of training, experience, and a body of professional resources to select someone to interview, and perhaps join your organization. Those personalized pages are the start, not the end. The new employee joins your staff, with the support and encouragement your organization gives them to help them succeed.

You need a wellness program that does what you do for work life every day. Successful, personalized engagement, tailored to their needs. Curated to their strengths and weaknesses, to help them want to grow, at their pace, in their way.

Biometric Screenings 101

All wellness programs generally start with an awareness campaign. Citing health statistics, emails and flyers are shared, and employees know that the visit costs them nothing but time. Tangible benefits are mentioned, too - a discount on health insurance, a cash payment, an exciting raffle for prizes.

After the blood draws and medical conversations, your employee has a sheet listing the basics. Height, weight, cholesterol, blood sugar, and other items on the standard screening form. But their physician will look at more than that, based on what they know of their patient's lifestyle history. This second set of information isn't always collected as part of the health screening system, but can be used by a savvy, highly-motivated employee to embark on a positive path to change.

Once the reward is issued, typical wellness programs switch to maintenance mode. Generic wellness advice and newsletters. Calls from nutritionists or counselors that might not be welcome. And the rosy returns don't quite match what the pretty slide deck indicated a year or two earlier.

Beyond Biometric Screenings

Fitmatic's approach takes a different trajectory. Once the reward is processed, we don't settle into autopilot, sending out the occasional generic health ping. We use annual health screenings as the start of a continuous health awareness model.

Starting at Awareness/Laying the Groundwork

Like most programs, we begin with a strategic awareness campaign. Not test, report, reward. They learn from the outset that they are taking steps to improved health, and a managed visit is part of that. We'll alleviate any concerns about the privacy of their health data. They will know who can access it, and why.

From there, we set them up for a successful visit. They'll know what to expect, what to ask, and bring up any concerns they have with their health practitioner.

Much More Than Test, Report, Reward

A successful wellness system doesn't get boxed back up and put back on the shelf until it's time for the next annual screening. Test, report, and reward are the centerpieces of other vendor's offerings; but as they wind down, we're just gearing up. Here's how we do that.

  • The Managed Visit: We start with the same basics of a health screening, an annual physical if applicable, and get that signed proof of visit form. The crucial difference is that our awareness program has primed your employee to ask questions about their concerns and to make the most of their time with their professional to get advice and answers.
  • The Managed Consultation: Once the results are in, your employee will consult with their health professional, get results, diagnoses, more answers to their questions. And they'll know to ask for and get their full workup, extended information we can use together to gauge their health and measure improvement over time.
  • The Reward and Beyond: The proof of visit form gets them the usual reward. But when they upload their full workup, the benefits really begin to unfold.

That information is theirs, and they know from our awareness campaign just how much they can do with it.

Upend the Box of Bio Screenings

Within a week of the upload of their full workup, we'll extract the information they've provided. Based on each individual's health data markers, we'll start education targeted to each employee. We open with the Why phase.

The Why Phase
  • Why am I at risk?
  • Why should I change?
  • Why should I change now?

The information that generally gets tracked include the big three: Cardiovascular, Metabolic, and Vitals. But health reports and measurements contain so much more. We'll look at hundreds of health markers and give your employees visibility into the state of their own health. Information they can look to at any time.

Our messaging gives them easy to understand information on all their health risk components. We show clearly how each of the hundreds of health markers impacts their overall health.

More than 92% of participants in our program uploaded additional critical health information that let us help define their wellness journey.

The Path Forward

"If at first you don't succeed, try, and try again." "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results." Platitudes have become memes, but their effectiveness is just as faint.

The road your employees have walked to reach who they are today has been a long one. The journey to returning to health may seem longer, hilly, full of hurdles. They're looking at a map they might not understand, and each challenge may seem insurmountable. The fifteen minutes they spend with a health professional fades, and their resolve to change diminishes.

So we don't show them the full atlas of road ahead. We don't show them the marathon of overcoming years of behaviors and habits.

We blaze a path by their side. Short goals. Gentle engagement. We brighten the path just ahead as they move forward through the fog.

Incremental Changes

If someone is motivated enough, they can do this completely on their own. Throw out all the junk food, buy a blender, and center their life around work, gym, and smoothies. They buy a few motivational tee shirts and download a meditation app. That's what all the magazines at the checkout counter promise, selling the belief in one last thing that will fix everything.

Those stories aren't shared because anyone can do it. Some of them might. But you want to help all of your employees. Not just the one or two for who doing it on their own finally works.

We do the research. We find their strengths, their weaknesses, and what they need. We engage with that information, tailored to what each person can do, in small steps, to move forward. We bring the research to them when they want it, in a way they can absorb it, and make those small steps down the path of a long journey to wellness.

Soft Engagement is Key

We know the story of change, and lack of change. We see it in ourselves every day. The dusty gym bag. The dead vegetables in the crisper drawer. The soft engagement we deploy turns small changes into small wins. These add up over time, and we show them how far they've come.

We measure everything. We do the heavy lifting on research for them, leveraging disparate sources, to bring what they need together. We combine everything into a single health view and behavior improvement model that fits them like a glove.

Our Success Results

We compared a physician's duties to your own earlier. You each have a strong team of professionals handling people and priming them for success. Your employees on the job success is further managed by your team with your own engagements. Targeted learning, professional mentoring, growth opportunities. We mirror that encouragement on the wellness side of their lives.

We aren't in the business of selling wellness to you. We're in the business of helping your employees improve their health through thoughtful engagement. The more you thoughtfully engage with someone open to what you're offering, the more positive results you see.

Here are some results we've seen, with different people responding to different levels of engagement. We looked at individuals whose BMI had been measured as Obese over the previous four years, and engaged them. Soft touches of information, research, and reviews of their results.

  • 3.5% improved without an engagement
  • 7.2% improved with 1 engagement touch
  • 11.3% improved with 2 engagement touches
  • 21.8% improved with at least 3 engagement touches, 2 of them in the first 3 months
  • 56.2% improved with 4 engagement campaigns of 3 touches every 10 weeks

These numbers hint at the success we have achieved with users of Fitmatic. 37.8% improved their BMI enough to be categorized as Normal within 12 months.

Don't Stop at the Start

Yes, biometric screenings improve health. Improve bottom lines. But with Fitmatic's solutions, you can help your staff use their annual physical to do much much more.

Think outside of the basic check boxes of an annual health assessment. Let us help you expand your employees' success by helping them reach healthy numbers. By giving them access to the tools they will want. Tools they can use to transform their risk numbers into a positive direction and healthy trajectory.