Winning a Deplorables Award is no easy feat for a wellness vendor. You have to out-lie, out-harm and generally out-stupid many worthy competitors. Yet this year’s competition wasn’t even close. Fitbit might have won on lies and stupidity alone, but no one was ever harmed by wearing an activity tracker. Interactive Health clobbered them in harming employees.  Like Wellsteps (the 2016 Deplorables Award Winner) they managed to do that multiple ways. This award covers the harms, the lies, and the stupidity. Truly the perfect storm of workplace wellness.

The Harms

Interactive Health’s signature move is conducting mass screens so inappropriate that doctors doing essentially the same thing — paying people to take this panoply of tests and then billing insurance — would lose their licenses.

Needless to say, when you do all sorts of inappropriate tests, you find all sorts of non-existent problems, and send all sorts of employees to all sorts of doctors. This isn’t simple overdiagnosis. This is classic hyperdiagnosis as described in our 2015 posting.

This is what we wrote in that posting, and it appears Interactive Health is the poster child for it. As compared to overdiagnosis, which is the unfortunate byproduct of well-intentioned efforts to help patients who present with symptoms, hyperdiagnosis is:

1. pre-emptive — employees aren’t asking to be diagnosed, don’t have symptoms, want to be left alone, and often aren’t even old enough to have the stuffing screened out of them yet;
2. either negligently inaccurate or purposefully deceptive (and IH has been requested many times to stop doing inappropriate screenings but they continue unabated);
3. powered by pay-or-play employee forfeitures for non-participation, of the type about to become illegal in 2019;
4. all about the braggadocio – wellness companies love to announce how many sick people they find in their screens…

…And here is Interactive Health doing exactly that:

What do you do after you round up all sorts of unsuspecting employees with inappropriate screens? Obviously, you bombard them with inappropriate advice, of course.  Specifically, the huge percentage of employees at risk for diabetes — thanks to those “a1c tests for everyone” (which of course are specifically not recommended by the USPSTF) are supposed to drink full-fat dairy, not skim. And absent hypertension, they are also not supposed to avoid salt. Quite the contrary, maintaining US-average salt consumption appears to be protective against diabetes. (Not to mention that salty snacks often substitute for sweet ones.) We had no trouble finding these studies online. Hopefully Interactive Health will use some of their award money to purchase an internet connection.

Fortunately, most employees pay no attention to Interactive Health’s 1500-word single-spaced tomes, so it’s unlikely their antediluvian advice harmed anybody.

Third, speaking of harms, they also harmed me when I went in to be screened. Not just by announcing my PSA score when I specifically asked not to be tested for PSA, but by stretching my calf far enough to send it into spasm.

The Lies

The English language already has 450,000 words, the most of any language. And yet none of those words adequately describe the amount of lying done by Interactive Health, even after they’ve been caught.

They are claiming “amazing results” based on one study by an unknown, now-defunct consulting firm that couldn’t even pay its internet provider. (The consulting firm had also made up a set of qualifications in which, other than articles and prepositions and conjunctions, every word was a lie.)

Once the lies were initially exposed, they paid me to stop writing about them for a while. I agreed, provided that they stop lying — meaning that I can write about them ad nauseam.

The smoking gun for the initial lie was that they accidentally admitted that they didn’t really reduce any risk factors. You can’t save a gazillion dollars by reducing employees’ wellness-sensitive medical events if you can’t improve employees’ wellness. According to their own figures (and of course excluding dropouts and non-participants, whose risks likely climb), their risk reduction was quite trivial. How trivial? The Wishful Thinking Multiplier — savings divided by the number of risk factors temporarily reduced — exceeded $50,000.

After that expose, they sealed their front-runner status for a Deplorables Award by simply trying to suppress the evidence. They took the trivial risk reduction displays out of that study, and now only make available the bowdlerized version, which they call a “research summary.” The only way you can get the raw risk reduction data is by scrolling down this post. Rule one in wellness whistle-blowing: always take screenshots.

And most recently, they’ve become strong proponents of Wellsteps’ strategy, bragging about how many high-risk employees became low-risk without mentioning that roughly as many low-risk employees became high-risk.  Suppose you flip 100 coins. It’s not enough to say that of 50 heads, 25 became tails. You also have to admit that 25 of the tails flipped to heads. At the end of the day, nothing changed. Here are the heads-to-tails, from their website. (By the way, this is also not true, even on its face.)

The Stupidity

Ask any employer what is the “new smoking” in terms of employee hazards and mortality. Most will say opioids, of course. Not Interactive Health. For them the “new smoking” is…

Hey, Interactive Health, maybe you can find a smart person to explain this particular statistic to you:

• According to the CDC, the number of annual deaths caused by smoking: 480,000
• According to the CDC, the number of annual deaths caused by sitting: 0

Here are some other differences between the two activities: Chairs don’t carry excise taxes or warning labels. If you’re under 18, you can buy a chair without a fake ID.  Workers are allowed to sit inside the building. Chairs don’t make you clothes smell, cause lung cancer or dangle from the lips of gunslingers in old John Ford westerns. Sitters aren’t assessed health insurance penalties. Your Match date will not feel misled if he or she catches you taking a seat, even if your profile didn’t disclose that you sit.

And finally…

Take The Interactive Health IQ Test

Which of these images is most unlike the others?