* Worksite wellness programs that teach employees how to be more discerning healthcare consumers are effective at doing so, according to a new randomized controlled study.
* Enrolling in a worksite wellness program that focused on healthcare engagement also improved employee health habits, although not as much as enrolling in a more traditional program focused on specific areas of wellness like nutrition and exercise.
A workplace program designed to teach employees to act more like consumers when they make health care decisions, for example, by finding and evaluating health information or choosing a benefit plan, also improved exercise, diet and other health habits, according to a new study in the latest issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
The study randomly assigned 631 employees of two large Midwestern companies to two programs and a control group. A traditional health education intervention program promoted better nutrition, physical activity, injury prevention, smoking cessation and stress management, while an “activated consumer” program taught participants to evaluate sources of health information, choose a health benefits plan, use preventive services and take medications properly.
High-risk employees in both intervention programs, those at risk for cardiovascular disease or premature death, were offered individualized coaching. Coaching for the “activated consumer” participants however, was less intensive than the traditional model with roughly half as many sessions and was designed to focus on building skills with using health care resources.
Two years later, 51 percent of participants completed a follow-up survey and screening. Participants were evaluated on a personal wellness profile, assessment of general health status, a Patient Activation Measure ? score, productivity, and on their ability to recognize a reliable health website.
“Both intervention groups saw improved self-reported health risk behaviors, such as reducing dietary fat and increasing exercise, although the overall effect favored the traditional approach.” – Paul Terry Ph.D. ?Park Nicollet Institute Minneapolis
“While improvement in reducing risk-behaviors might have been expected in the traditional health education group, similar improvements within the group receiving consumer education suggest that consumerism skills generalize into self-health management skills,” the authors noted.
Although all three groups of participants registered improvements in measures of health consumer activation, such as the ability to recognize reliable health web sites, only those in the activated consumer program did significantly better than control. Clinical health outcomes and productivity were not affected in the two year period following the survey.
Sue Baldwin, Ph.D., of Buffalo State College, co-chair of the American Public Health Association’s working group on worksite health promotion, agreed that “the combination is key. Using both approaches, not just one” deserves further research, she said. The finding that less intensive coaching worked as well as more frequent contact was of particular interest,” she observed.
More generally, “if it’s not part of a company’s policy to have healthy employees, they will never support worksite wellness, and businesses will not implement such policies until they have research that proves it works. [The current study] does a great job in starting to look at that,” Baldwin said.
