I usually say the reason I can’t expose all the lies in wellness is that there aren’t enough hours in a day. Unfortunately for Interactive Health, today there are. (In your face, Arizona residents!)

PS For my next and final posting in the Interactive Health trilogy, it would help if anyone could send me some of their outcomes reports. Obviously I won’t use your name or the name of your accounts. The advantage for you is if I use your stats, it’s like getting a free consult. 

When we last left our antiheroes, we were counting the number of lies their consulting firm told in their report underpinning Interactive Health’s financial savings model. We found ten. That may not seem like a lot by wellness standards, but those were in just two little bullet points. The only people who tell more lies in fewer words have Twitter accounts.

After publication, we discovered a new tidbit about Zoe Consulting. Along with the adjectives “top-tier” and “nationally recognized,” which they used to describe themselves, another would be “hunh?” Yeah, I know, not technically an adjective but Zoe is not technically a company.

Yes, this “top-tier nationally recognized” outfit has disconnected both its internet and its telephone.

And don’t try to find them in person, either. The address listed for them shows this streetview. If you can’t quite see it on your smartphone, I can describe the scene: imagine Narnia-meets-Stephen King.

Interactive Health Outcomes Report

Zoe Consulting called me soon after my first expose of Interactive Health appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and offered to pay me not to write about Interactive Health’s squirrelly outcomes any more, at least on my old website. I agreed — but only on the condition that they promise to tell the truth in the future, which has proven to be an insurmountable hurdle.

By the way, good news for any perps who think they have to pay me to have their material removed. If you are honest and I make a mistake, I pay you! Or if you make a mistake and own up to it, I pay you.

This is not either situation. Indeed, we have never encountered either situation.

Here is the report in question. You’ll notice there are lots of claims about massive savings, extending to workers comp and disability too. But not a peep about risk factors. That’s why they call this a “research summary” and not a “research study”: they removed the actual research after I observed that it invalidated their financial claims. Speaking of which, here is their financial claim: after three years, costs are magically about 18% — thousands of dollars — lower than they would have been.

The “research summary” contains only one sentence about the program itself: “The findings below indicate actual costs fell below the projected costs due to the positive impact of the Interactive Health program.”

How “positive” was that “impact of the Interactive Health program”?  Excluding dropouts which of course they conveniently ignore, the number of high-risk employees fell by 1.4%. Since spending on wellness-sensitive medical events is about $100/year, optimistically you’d save $1.40/year by reducing risk 1.4% — assuming the savings accrued immediately. To cover up their mistake, they removed the risk analysis.

Anticipating they would attempt this cover-up, I kept a screenshot. This screenshot is also quite useful to illustrate regression to the mean in my course on Critical Outcomes Report Analysis. (In the display below, the green represents improvement and the red represents deterioration. Obviously — meaning obviously to everyone except Interactive Health — people who are low risk can only get worse or stay the same, while people who are high-risk can only improve or stay the same. Classic regression to the mean.)

In this graphic, you can see 10% as the starting point and 8.6% as the ending point in the high-risk categories:

Instead of $1.40/year, they claimed savings of up to $3084/year — exaggerating by a factor exceeding 2000. Not 2000%. In wellness, 2000% would be rounding error. By contrast, a factor of 2000 equates to 200,000%.

200,000 is a big number. To put the number 200,000 in perspective, imagine stacking 6 Empire State Buildings on top of one other. Do that 200,000 times, and you reach the moon.

We are going to call Interactive Health liars. However, we don’t mean that as an insult, or even an objective observation (though that too). We mean that as a compliment. We have too much respect for their intelligence to believe that they could possibly be stupid enough to make a mistake of that magnitude.

However, if they would like to insist that they were this stupid (the “dumb and dumber” defense pioneered by Ron Goetzel) — and substitute what they now know to be the correct answer of $1.40 in place of the $3084 and circulate the revised result to their customers — we will publicly apologize for calling them liars. And, yes, we will pay them the honorarium noted above.

As for their botched cover-up of the initial results, perhaps that was just an unfortunate but inadvertent omission that coincidentally took place immediately after I pointed out their own risk analysis invalidated all their own claims about savings.

Postscript: Zoe Consulting’s Wisest Move 

Zoe Consulting did do something right. At one point in the conversation I mentioned above, I recommended that they hire a smart person, based on the observation that a smart person would realize that the trivial risk factor reduction couldn’t possibly support the gargantuan savings claims. The CEO replied: “Al, the savings have nothing to do with the risk reduction. The two analyses are completely separate.”

If you are prone to comments like that, the wisest move is indeed to disconnect your phones and internet.