American Heart Association, StayWell

Short Summary of Company:

AHA wellness: “The American Heart Association’s Worksite Wellness Kit encourages companies to give employees an excuse to get away from their desks.”

Staywell: “StayWell helps clients across the health care spectrum address the changing landscape like no other company. We leverage the latest technology, enhanced analytics, and deep consumer insights in an integrated portfolio of best-in-class client solutions.”

Materials Being Reviewed

• The Role of Worksite Health Screening: A Policy Statement
• The Health Care Blog’s Observations on that Policy

Questions for AHA

Your conflict-of-interest statement says you “make every effort to avoid actual or potential conflicts of interest that may arise as a result of an outside relationship.” Why doesn’t letting the Chief Science Officer of a wellness company write your wellness policy citing his own articles in support of wellness violate that policy?

ANS: Refused to answer

Were you aware that Staywell perpetrated a scheme in which they worked with Mercer to convince British Petroleum that their outcomes were 100 times better than what Staywell itself said was possible?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why did you allow a writer to source his own articles, thus creating an AHA policy stand that is clearly in his own financial interest?

ANS: Refused to answer

Is it representative of your peer review policy not to “vet” your peer reviewers to see if they themselves were involved in scandals that are very relevant to the article they are reviewing?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why did you as an organization and the writers of that policy decline The Health Care Blog’s invitation to defend your article against observations that it was totally conflicted and based on data known to be invalid?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why did you allow the writers to cherry-pick the available literature, ignoring the overwhelming evidence against your policy and instead continue to cite the old “Harvard study” whose lead author has now walked it back three times?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why did your editors allow the writers to call this (disavowed) Harvard study “recent” even though it was written in 2009 using data with an average date of 2004?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why did your writers knowingly cite studies that no legitimate health services researcher would find acceptable due to obvious study design flaws, like comparing active motivated participants to non-motivated non-participants, claiming that an outcome on volunteers who persisted in the program for three years is representative of the population as a whole, and taking credit for risk reductions in previously high-risk people that would have happened anyway?

ANS: Refused to answer

Why didn’t you mention that the screening frequencies you are endorsing are far in excess of guidelines set by the United States Preventive Services Task Force?

ANS: Refused to answer

As an association named for the human heart, how come you didn’t publish cautions that the screening frequencies you’re recommending can lead to overdiagnosis, overtreatment and other cardiometabolic harms?

ANS: Refused to answer

Postscript:  Any apologies, retractions, explanations etc. other than answering the questions

A July 17 email from co-author Ross Arena: “I am troubled by these accusations, as is AHA.  I have included an AHA representative who will address this.”  [No AHA response followed.]

A July 17 response from us noted that technically these are observations, not accusations.  We “observed” that their screening policy was co-authored by the CEO of  a screening company.  (We offered to link them to dictionary.com to see the difference between the two words, but they declined.)