We are now in Ron’s wheelhouse, which is publishing peer-reviewed articles in third-tier wellness trade journals. Let’s see how he does.
For those who are new to this thread, Part 4 is here, and links to earlier installments. The recording is here. Time stamps roughly synch up.
53:30
Ron says he is a researcher, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals. He “applauds” me again for giving them the “opportunity” to correct their many errors, and says the comments I make are often “right on the money.”
It is indeed a creative use of the word “opportunity,” as in: “Last year the IRS gave me the opportunity to be subject to an audit.”
He says “that’s what the scientific method is all about, having peer reviewers critique your work and find problems.” And yet, I’ve never, ever been asked to peer review anything that he and his cronies have ever published. Go figure.
He would like “us” (meaning him and his cronies) to be able to review my work, even though I’m not allowed to peer-review theirs. He says he has “never seen an article by Al Lewis…to review.”
Hmmm…perhaps his internet is down?
Since all my work is right on this site (including links to other work, in “In the News” to Health Affairs, Harvard Business Review etc.) he is free to review it anytime, and we publish all comments. There isn’t really any need to for him to look at our material because mostly it’s his own and his cronies’ material. And you know the mantra from Surviving Workplace Wellness: “In wellness, you don’t have to challenge the data to invalidate it. You merely have to read the data. It will invalidate itself.”
As in his opening remarks and in his “secret” letter to the media, he once again criticizes my stuff as being “out there…outlandish,” but gives zero examples.
55:30
Ron, in the process of saying something he knows not to be true for a change, accidentally endorses me.
“Ron, would you say I am the most qualified person in peer review in terms of finding the most mistakes?”
“No.”
“Well, who has found more mistakes than I have?”
[Silence and nervous laughter from the audience.]
I point out that — despite his tacit endorsement just now that I am the best peer reviewer — none of his friends’ wellness trade journals have ever asked me to peer review anything.
And he still refuses to say why he hasn’t claimed the million-dollar reward.
57:00
Peer reviewed or not, numbers need to add up, and Ron’s don’t. In one award-winning example, Eastman Chemical, $900/person in savings was shown — with risk factors changing by only 0.17 per person, excluding dropouts.
Ron did not rebut this. Eastman was one of the two Koop Award applications he had doctored when it turned out the applicant had accidentally told the truth but no one on the award committee noticed.
58:30
Ron has already run away from most of the industry’s claims, as earlier installments of this debate have observed. Now is he running away from Wellsteps’ Steve Aldana, whom he has co-presented and co-authored with and who naturally is on his Koop Award committee. Aldana recently wrote that I was “sick” because a colleague posted my Harvard Business Review article on his linkedin group and asked what people thought of it.
[2016 Update: Ron is now embracing Steve Aldana and Wellsteps, the first company to admit to harming employees.]
59:00
Ron is turning his blacklisting of me into my “plea” to do peer review in his trade journals. I have never “pled” to do peer review in his trade journals, which are mostly useful as punchlines. I merely observe that I’ve never been asked. “You’re very good at calling out mistakes, but you’re not very good at publishing your own research studies.”
He then cites the Johnson & Johnson study (that’s the same Johnson & Johnson that just proposed the Fat Tax). That is the only study he’s ever done that I’ve not been able to invalidate on its face, so he gets his first point of this round here. Not because the study is valid. There wasn’t enough data in it for me to automatically prove that it was invalid, which is a very high standard, but that’s my standard–“face invalidity.”
So there you have it: one company in the entire universe that might possibly have saved money on wellness. And as coincidence would have it, they also sell wellness services. No publication bias there…
November 4, 2016 Update: I just found this J&J study. It is even worse than the others. Employees lying on HRAs, trivial risk reductions…and of course massive savings. It appears that all they did was increase the deductible and then give employees $500 to do wellness, thus shifting the money out of the healthspend into the incentives account, which is not included in the “savings.”
1:00:00
I point out that even though I’m apparently not qualified enough to peer review for his friends who run low-impact journals, I do get called upon to peer review for Health Affairs and other high-impact journals. And most importantly, while I’ve done only two peer-reviewed articles, one led to the dismantling of the North Carolina Medicaid medical home. The other was #1 for 2015 in the American Journal of Managed Care and continues to be cited widely. My award-winning book was peer-reviewed by some of healthcare’s leading figures: Stuart Altman, James Prochaska, Tom Scully, Leah Binder, Bob Galvin, Regina Herzlinger, and Nortin Hadler (the same Nortin Hadler who apologized for poor peer review by one of Ron’s favorite trade journals).
Most importantly, speaking of peer review, Quizzify is the only population health company that may publicly say “our content is reviewed by doctors at Harvard Medical School.”
1:02
Ron — whose entire industry loses money and can’t even guarantee not losing money — is now lecturing me on Quizzify’s guarantee of savings and how it needs to be peer-reviewed. I was not expecting to be attacked for offering an incredible, unique, value proposition, so I didn’t have a good answer. Only in wellness is saving money for customers considered a bad idea.
1:02:30
He continues to harp on peer review by his friends-and-relations, but I won the round with one simple observation: “We are not here today because of Ron’s peer-reviewed articles. We are here today because of my non-peer-reviewed articles.”
I could fill a blog with all the nonsense that Ron’s friends who run so-called “peer-reviewed journals” have published. Come to think of it, I have. Examples:
AJHP’s proposal to tie insurance premiums to weight, like ordering lobster or mailing packages
AJHP’s proposal to use wellness to dramatically reduce productivity
JOEM’s Aetna debacle
JOEM’s failure to understand how to do stock price analysis
AJHP’s “Randomized control trials show negative ROIs.” (I didn’t have to post anything here–this spoke for itself.)
JOEM’s fabricated evidence of savings
They Said What? 