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Tag: Health Risk Assessment (HRA)

Penn State’s Wellness Disaster: How to Avoid Employee Rejection of Wellness Programs–and Even Get Buy-In

One of the lessons I frequently relearn in life is that people do not want unsolicited advice. An example that most parents can relate to is that my 6-year-old daughter does not want my help tying her shoes, even when we’re running late. Similarly, most employees — and certainly their dependents — do not believe they need to change how they manage their health.

This is why Penn State’s moderately structured, but poorly executed, wellness program failed so disastrously. The recent New York Times article about the program reports that “[a]fter weeks of vociferous objections by faculty members” University President Rodney A. Erickson—not the human resources leadership—announced it was abandoning the $1,200 annual surcharge levied against employees who refused to meet certain requirements. Those requirements included filling out a health risk assessment (HRA), participating in a biometric screening, and getting a medical check-up.

Human resources professionals’ fear of this type of outcome prevents many potentially meaningful and engaging wellness programs from even being introduced. To overcome this inherent resistance to wellness, broad employee understanding and support of the program is a prerequisite. The administrators at Penn State failed to attain this goal. Wellness — like any major change — cannot solely be a top-down effort, launched with a letter from the president, especially at consensus-driven academic institutions.

At Penn State, the outcome could have been successful if leaders had built a consensus prior to launching that wellness programs can save lives, reduce costs and improve performance. This is not the type of organization where decisions can be defended by saying: “This program is the one recommended by our health insurer.”

Building consensus for better outcomes

Through consensus-building, Miami University in Ohio successfully launched its voluntary health risk assessment, biometric screening and doctor visit program in 2010 and transitioned to a premium discount program in 2011. Premium discounts started at $15 per month and increased to $45 per month in 2013. More than 85 percent of the covered faculty and dependents participate in the program, and age-specific preventive screenings have increased substantially. The top three factors contributing to Miami University’s success are communication, consistency, and C-suite and departmental manager support.

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Why Are Al Lewis and Vik Khanna Such Jerks?

flying cadeuciiRecently, The Health Care Blog published a post by Robert Sutton asking why there were so many jerks in medicine.

That posting made the underlying assumption that being a jerk is a bad thing.  In response, we are posting today a defense — really more an explanation of the features and benefits — of jerkdom, at least in our segment of healthcare, wellness and outcomes measurement.

In 1976 an obscure graduate student named Laura Ulrich (now a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor) wrote: “History is seldom made by well-behaved women.”   That statement could be applied much more broadly.  In any field governed by voluntary consensus – especially where the consensus specifically and financially benefits the people making the consensus – radical change does not happen jerklessly.

The best current example might be the critique of Choosing Wisely in the New England Journal of Medicine in which it was pointed out that only three specialty societies blacklisted controversial procedures still performed in significant enough quantity to affect that specialty’s economics.

(Another example of financially fueled consensus gone awry is the RUC, also frequently and justifiably excoriated in The Health Care Blog and elsewhere.)

Specifically, there are three reasons we act like jerks.   (Four reasons if you include selling our book, but we acted like jerks well before our book came out.)

First, as Upton Sinclair said, “You can’t prove something to someone whose salary depends on believing the opposite.” Hence, making nice rarely works and may backfire when you are pointing out a total waste that  also happens to be someone else’s income.

After Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) sponsored an outcomes study  by Mercer finding massive savings through their patient-centered medical home (PCMH) in an age cohort (children under one year of age) in which no utilization reduction took place and which, as luck would have it, was not enrolled in the PCMH anyway, we kindly wrote to them and offered to show them the error of their ways, privately.

We didn’t get a response.  We repeated the offer when they put out another RFP for even more validation, pointing out that using the HCUP database meant no RFP was needed — we would be able to give them an answer in less time than it would take them to evaluate the RFP responses, and save them close to $500,000 in taxpayer money too.

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