Not all wellness vendors are as bad as Slate makes them out to be. Companies whose names begin with “Q” are doing quite splendidly.

Quizzify’s stack of stellar reviews and reviewers (see Employee Benefit News, Not Running a Hospital (Paul Levy), and Bob Merberg) now includes Tom Emerick, who just wrote an Insurance Thought Leadership review entitled: There May Be a Cure for Wellness.

Far be it from us to discourage anyone from reading the full review, but here are some excerpts:

“Quizzify…transforms the boring but long-overdue task of educating employees about health, healthcare and their health benefit into an entertaining trivia game.”

“Quizzify provides a plethora of shock-and-awe, ‘counter-detailing’ questions-and-answers (with full links to sources) that will educate even the savviest consumers of healthcare and entertain even the dourest CFO.”

“Scores and scores of people have told me they fudge answers on HRAs. Interestingly, they feel they are on the ethical high ground to do that because of the goofy, nosy and intrusive questions they are asked to answer, e.g., asking about your [future] pregnancy plans… Quizzify, on the other hand, encourages people to cheat. Quizzify wants you to look up the answers because that’s how you learn. So instead of denying human nature, Quizzify channels it.”

Tom also addresses the concern that employees might think Quizzify is all about trying to keep them from spending money on healthcare:

“On the other hand, there are instances where people should go to the doctor but don’t. Swollen ankles? Painless, perhaps, but you may have a circulation problem, possibly a serious one. Blood in your urine, but it goes away before you even make an appointment? That could be a bladder tumor tearing and then re-attaching itself, especially if you smoke. And show me one health risk assessment that correctly advises people over 55 or 60 to get a shingles vaccine if they had chicken pox as a kid.”

That last point is pretty emblematic of the difference between wellness and Quizzify. It’s a classic example of wellness vendors wasting opportunities to actually provide employees with useful information. Virtually no HRA advises shingles vaccines for the relevant subset of employees.

Conversely, to focus on one of the longstanding obsessions of wellness vendors, there are no questions in Quizzify where the answer is: “Buckle your seat belt.” We figure HRAs have that covered.

We would also observe that if your employees don’t realize they should buckle their seat belts, wellness is probably not your biggest problem.

Boring but Important Disclosure: While this blog is independent of Quizzify, I am a principal in Quizzify.