Paul Terry, formerly of Staywell and the Health Enhancement Research Organization, has just been appointed the new editor of the wellness industry trade publication, the American Journal of Health Promotion.  He replaces Michael “Let’s Charge Employees Insurance by the Pound” O’Donnell in that role.

Mr. Terry brings exactly the type of expertise to this job that AJHP readers have come to expect, in that very few people can claim to surpass Mr. Terry’s ability to fabricate outcomes.

I first became familiar with Mr. Terry’s work when Staywell claimed mathematically impossible savings for British Petroleum’s pry-poke-and-prod wellness program, which I dutifully reported on The Health Care Blog in the posting: “BP’s Wellness Program is Spewing Invalidity.” Staywell, as a preferred vendor of Mercer, was able to “convince” Mercer to fabricate savings, when their client, BP, asked for an evaluation.  Staywell pretended to have saved almost $20,000 for every risk factor reduced among active participants (meaning dropouts and nonparticipants’ failures aren’t counted).

This was quite a feat considering that the average employee only spent about $5000 during the year in which this analysis was conducted. And of course only a tiny percentage of healthcare costs in the short term are attributable to risk factor reduction anyway. (Staywell was offered the opportunity to rebut, and didn’t.)

But the smoking gun here was that Mr. Terry apparently forgot that Staywell itself only claimed to be able to save $129/risk factor reduced. Magnanimous guy that I am, I was kind enough to point out that integrity chasm for him in the article.

Most people, when they are caught fabricating data, try to deny it. But Paul Terry brags about it.   In case you haven’t already done so, take a looksee at his defamatory letter to the media that he sent, along with his cronies Ron Goetzel and Seth Serxner. He insists that they made up the data I reviewed — meaning his best argument against me is that I didn’t realize he was lying. If we take him to court, he could argue that the judge should apply the legal standard for negligence — that I “knew or should have known” their data was fabricated, because all their data is fabricated.

Although ironically it turns out the data they insisted was fabricated was, this time, legitimate — meaning that he was making up his claim that HERO had made up the data. That’s a topic for another blog.  Suffice it to say that, in the immortal words of the great philosopher LL Cool J, he lied about the lies he lied about.

Most importantly, if you read the letter he wrote, you’ll see that another of his arguments is that when calculating ROI, you should not compare costs to savings.  And a good thing because comparing costs to savings, and other feats of arithmetic, would be the wellness industry’s second-worst nightmare (next to facts).

Refusing to acknowledge the existence of basic arithmetic makes Mr. Terry a perfect choice to be editor of the wellness industry trade publication.