Collaborating with Staywell may not be enhancing the American Heart Association’s reputation.

Occasionally we have to attend to our Day Jobs and can’t post regularly. Fortunately, we have access to a bolus of posts from mid-2014, the posts that went up on this site initially. There were too many stories to highlight, so we decided to inventory them, in order to fill in gaps when we didn’t have time for new posts.

High on that list would be Staywell. First was their collaboration with Mercer, in which they agreed to tell British Petroleum that they found $17,000/person savings.  They knew those savings were mathematically impossible since the average person only spends $6000/year.  They also forgot that they themselves had said it was only possible to save $100/person.

Following on the heels of that was a collaboration with the American Heart Association to create screening guidelines that (surprise) call for much more screening than the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends.

In both cases, we welcomed — and in the latter case offered $1000 honorarium for — responses to our questions, but our good-faith offer was met with silence.

Also, in both articles Staywell continued to cite Katherine Baicker’s study that she herself no longer defends, with the added wrinkle of referring to it as “recent” in the hopes that no one looks at the endnotes and sees that it was submitted for publication in 2009 and covered studies from a decade before that. With any luck they’ll have enough integrity to stop citing that study now that RAND has invalidated it. A good rule of thumb is that anyone who cites Baicker’s study without noting that no one (including Professor Baicker) believes that 3.27-to-1 ROI any more is prima facie deliberately misleading people. It is no longer credible to say one doesn’t know that her study has been shown to be hooey and that she is no longer defending it (and actually says she has no more interest in wellness).

Our health benefit education will never break your heart

We recommend click-throughs to both studies. Each raises questions that Staywell refused to answer, after initial conversations which confirmed they knew about these issues. You’ll also see how the American Heart Association was shocked, shocked, that anyone would question their integrity (perhaps they haven’t read The Big Fat Surprise) but then let it go, rather than create a news cycle.

Staywell also helped give British Petroleum a Koop Award.  Nice to be on the award committee AND be an award sponsor–makes it easy to give your customers awards.  With one or two exceptions, we can’t remember the last time the Koop Award went to a company with no connection to a sponsor or committee member. Perhaps someone could let us know?