Healthmine just released a survey bragging about how many employees were diagnosed through wellness programs. That reminded us of our popular 2013 posting on The Health Care Blog called Hyperdiagnosis.  We are re-posting and updating it below.   

By now we are all familiar with the concept of overdiagnosis, where “we” is defined as “everyone except the wellness industry.”

Wellness vendors haven’t gotten the memo that most employees should simply be left alone.  Instead, they want to screen the stuffing of employees, at considerable cost to the employer and risk to the employee.  The wellness vendors who overscreen employees the most win awards for it, like Health Fitness Corporation did with the Nebraska state employee program.

We call this new plateau of clinical unreality “hyperdiagnosis,” and it is the wellness industry’s bread-and-butter.  It differs from overdiagnosis four ways:

1. It is pre-emptive;
2. It is either negligently inaccurate or purposefully deceptive;
3. It is powered by pay-or-play forfeitures;
4. The final hallmark of hyperdiagnosis is braggadocio – wellness companies love to announce how many sick people they find in their screens.

1. Pre-Emptive

Overdiagnosis starts when a patient in need of testing visits a doctor. By contrast, in hyperdiagnosis, the testing comes in need of patients, via annual workplace screening of up to seventy different lab values–most of which, as They Said What? has shown, make no clinical sense.  Testing for large numbers of abnormalities on large numbers of employees guarantees large numbers of “findings,” clinically significant or not.  The more findings, the more money wellness vendors can add on for coaching and the more savings they can claim when they re-test.

2.Inaccurate or Deceptive

Most of these findings turn out to be clinically insignificant or simply wrong, no surprise given that the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends universal annual screening only for blood pressure, because for other screens the potential harms of annual screening outweigh the benefits.  The wellness industry knows this, and they also know that the book Seeking Sickness:  Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease demolishes their highly profitable screening business model.   (We are not cherry-picking titles here—there is no book Here’s an Idea:  Let’s Hunt for Disease.)  And yet most wellness programs require employees to undergo annual screens in order to avoid a financial forfeiture.

Hyperdiagnosis also obsesses with annual preventive doctor visits.  Like screening, though, annual “preventive” visits on balance cause more harm than good.  The wellness industry knows this, because we posted this information on their LinkedIn groups, before we were banned from most of them.  They also presumably have internet access on their own.

3. Pay-or-play forfeitures

The worthlessness, the inconvenience, and the privacy invasion make screens very unpopular.  The wellness industry and their corporate customers “solve” that problem by tying large and increasing sums of money annually — now $694 on average – to participation in these schemes.  Yet participation rates are still low.

4. Braggadocio

While doctors are embarrassed by overdiagnosis, boasting is an essential ingredient of hyperdiagnosis.  We’ve already blogged on how Health Fitness Corporation bragged (and lied, as they later admitted) about the number of cancer cases they found in Nebraska.  They also bragged about the rate of cardiometabolic disease they found — 40% in the screened population — even though they admitted almost no employee did anything about those findings, and only 161 state employees reduced risk factors.  Hence, it was the worst of both worlds:  telling people they are sick without helping them get better.  Nothing like telling someone they’re sick to increase their productivity.

Compass Health is our favorite example of hyperdiagnosis braggadocio.  We realize this screenshot is a bit tough to read, but the hilarity is worth the effort.  We pulled this vignette from On The (even) Lighter Side, They Said What?‘s most popular feature.

The Definition of a “Healthy Employee” Is One Who Has Not Been Diagnosed by Compass Health

Feeling fine today?  Alas, you better get your affairs in order, bid your loved ones adieu, and watch the shows you’ve DVR-ed.  Why? Because, dodo-brain, feeling fine means you have:

You are “walking around without a clue that [you have] a debilitating or terminal condition.”  According to Compass Health (which at this point, having been “outed” by us, had the good sense to take this off their website…but not until we captured a screen shot), the major symptom of I Feel Fine Syndrome is:  not having symptoms.

We’ll let them take it from here, to display not only their epidemiological prowess but also, this being the wellness industry, their grammar and spelling prowess as well:

We must confess we learned a lot from Compass.  We had not realized that employers’ concerns about employees feeling fine had their roots in ancient history.  But there it is, right in the opening words:  these concerns date back “millenia” [sic], when employers failed to get their employees tested for “percolating” conditions before throwing them to the lions.

So the bad news is that feeling fine may be hazardous to your health.  The good news is that your ICU bed may not need a DNR notice anytime soon because elsewhere Compass says it “has programs and solutions to help your employees overcome their I Feel Fine Syndrome.”  And it is “very likely” these programs and solutions can “completely cure the problem…forever in our bodies.”

And not a moment too soon, because we’re never felt better in our lives, which means the clock is ticking.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is, if we join Compass’s program it sounds like we need to start contributing more to our 401K’s.

Summary

We’d like to think that all our exposés have made a dent in the wellness industry’s business model, but the forces arrayed in the other direction have so far overwhelmed us.   The price of screening has plummeted almost to the $1-per-lab-value level for comprehensive screens, and as with anything, the lower the price, the greater the amount sold.

Couple those economics with the advent of genetic testing as part of wellness, big and profitable fines for non-participants, and the EEOC being defanged as a sop to the Business Roundtable, and it’s clear the wellness industry’s highly profitable hyperdiagnostic jihad against the American workforce has barely begun.

By contrast, Quizzify teaches employees that “just because it’s healthcare, doesn’t mean it’s good for you,” and to only get screened according to the USPSTF guidelines.  That’s a message that employees would love to hear, but that wellness vendors can’t afford to tell them.