Now that the myth that there is any ROI in wellness is thoroughly both debunked and also even acknowledged by the wellness industry, vendors often fall back on the “argument” that nothing else in healthcare needs an ROI.  Why should workplace wellness be singled out?  The editor of the American Journal of Health Promotion, Michael O’Donnell, even asked: “Who cares about an ROI anyway?”

The answer to Michael’s question?  Everyone should care. And everyone should insist on an ROI from wellness, for three distinct reasons.  Each reason is sufficient on its own.  So even if there were a fallacy in two of the reasons (and there isn’t), the remaining reason would still be definitive.

First, consider an employee with appendicitis. You don’t calculate an ROI. You call an ambulance. But suppose a vendor says to you: “If an employee’s appendix bursts, the cost could be $100,000.  So we propose taking out everyone’s appendix preventively.”

You’d ask:  “What’s the rate of burst appendixes and how much do appendectomies cost?”  While that’s an extreme example (and we didn’t mean to give these people any ideas), this is basically the calculation you should make when vendors propose screens. Here’s how to do the calculation. You’ll be shocked at how much it costs to avoid even one event by screening everyone.

Second, wellness is the only thing in healthcare that employees are forced to do, subject to a financial forfeiture of penalties or lost incentives.  Other activities which people are penalized for not doing include: wearing helmets/life jackets/seat belts and getting kids vaccinated.  In each case, the clinical evidence/science overwhelms considerations of personal choice.  (Even then, in some states personal choice still rules.)

By contrast, the only thing that’s overwhelming about wellness evidence/science is how overwhelmingly the evidence eviscerates wellness, which of course is what this site is all about.  Unfortunately, wellness vendors don’t understand evidence — or for that matter healthcare itself. Many vendors have no knowledge of basics like clinical guidelines, or even arithmetic.  One wonders how they can do their jobs as wellness vendors without understanding healthcare. And that brings us to the third reason that wellness (unlike healthcare) needs an ROI, which is…

…Wellness isn’t healthcare.  Quite literally every other provider of physical healthcare–from heart surgeons to  acupuncturists–needs to train, pass a test, get a license, take continuing education, and be subject to review by an oversight board.  Not wellness vendors.  You can become a wellness vendor for $67,000. “Up to” eight days of classroom and on-the-job-training are also included in that $67,000.  (To put that in perspective, Four Seasons housekeepers get ten days of training.) The vendor that offers these franchises, Star Wellness, brags about how no healthcare background is needed to be a wellness vendor. A background in “sales or municipal administration” is perfectly sufficient.

So if you’re wondering why wellness vendors know so little about wellness, there’s your answer:  they aren’t required to know anything about wellness. Knowing just a little exceeds the minimum requirement.

Quizzify does have an ROI…and it’s guaranteed.

To conclude, here is our advice to workplace wellness vendors trying to justify what popular healthcare blogger Paul Levy calls the “wellness tax“: shut up and just be happy you still get to collect it, and that the authorities haven’t shut you down. (A doctor doing all this overscreening and billing for it would have been shut down.)

Don’t try to justify your hyperdiagnostic jihad on the basis of ROI or any other purpose other than enriching your bank accounts. Every time you try, you provide yet another reason why whatever college gave you a degree in anything other than advanced idiocy should lose its accreditation.