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Hyperdiagnosis: The Wellness Industry’s Anti-Employee Jihad
Healthmine just released a survey bragging about how many employees were diagnosed through wellness programs. That reminded us of our popular 2013 posting on The Health Care Blog called Hyperdiagnosis. We are re-posting and updating it below.
By now we are all familiar with the concept of overdiagnosis, where “we” is defined as “everyone except the wellness industry.”
Wellness vendors haven’t gotten the memo that most employees should simply be left alone. Instead, they want to screen the stuffing of employees, at considerable cost to the employer and risk to the employee. The wellness vendors who overscreen employees the most win awards for it, like Health Fitness Corporation did with the Nebraska state employee program.
We call this new plateau of clinical unreality “hyperdiagnosis,” and it is the wellness industry’s bread-and-butter. It differs from overdiagnosis four ways:
- It is pre-emptive;
- It is either negligently inaccurate or purposefully deceptive;
- It is powered by pay-or-play forfeitures;
- The final hallmark of hyperdiagnosis is braggadocio – wellness companies love to announce how many sick people they find in their screens.
1. Pre-Emptive
Overdiagnosis starts when a patient in need of testing visits a doctor. By contrast, in hyperdiagnosis, the testing comes in need of patients, via annual workplace screening of up to seventy different lab values–most of which, as They Said What? has shown, make no clinical sense. Testing for large numbers of abnormalities on large numbers of employees guarantees large numbers of “findings,” clinically significant or not. The more findings, the more money wellness vendors can add on for coaching and the more savings they can claim when they re-test.
2.Inaccurate or Deceptive
Most of these findings turn out to be clinically insignificant or simply wrong, no surprise given that the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends universal annual screening only for blood pressure, because for other screens the potential harms of annual screening outweigh the benefits. The wellness industry knows this, and they also know that the book Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease demolishes their highly profitable screening business model. (We are not cherry-picking titles here—there is no book Here’s an Idea: Let’s Hunt for Disease.) And yet most wellness programs require employees to undergo annual screens in order to avoid a financial forfeiture.
Hyperdiagnosis also obsesses with annual preventive doctor visits. Like screening, though, annual “preventive” visits on balance cause more harm than good. The wellness industry knows this, because we posted this information on their LinkedIn groups, before we were banned from most of them. They also presumably have internet access on their own.
3. Pay-or-play forfeitures
The worthlessness, the inconvenience, and the privacy invasion make screens very unpopular. The wellness industry and their corporate customers “solve” that problem by tying large and increasing sums of money annually — now $694 on average – to participation in these schemes. Yet participation rates are still low.
4. Braggadocio
While doctors are embarrassed by overdiagnosis, boasting is an essential ingredient of hyperdiagnosis. We’ve already blogged on how Health Fitness Corporation bragged (and lied, as they later admitted) about the number of cancer cases they found in Nebraska. They also bragged about the rate of cardiometabolic disease they found — 40% in the screened population — even though they admitted almost no employee did anything about those findings, and only 161 state employees reduced risk factors. Hence, it was the worst of both worlds: telling people they are sick without helping them get better. Nothing like telling someone they’re sick to increase their productivity.
Compass Health is our favorite example of hyperdiagnosis braggadocio. We realize this screenshot is a bit tough to read, but the hilarity is worth the effort. We pulled this vignette from On The (even) Lighter Side, They Said What?‘s most popular feature.
The Definition of a “Healthy Employee” Is One Who Has Not Been Diagnosed by Compass Health
Feeling fine today? Alas, you better get your affairs in order, bid your loved ones adieu, and watch the shows you’ve DVR-ed. Why? Because, dodo-brain, feeling fine means you have:
You are “walking around without a clue that [you have] a debilitating or terminal condition.” According to Compass Health (which at this point, having been “outed” by us, had the good sense to take this off their website…but not until we captured a screen shot), the major symptom of I Feel Fine Syndrome is: not having symptoms.
We’ll let them take it from here, to display not only their epidemiological prowess but also, this being the wellness industry, their grammar and spelling prowess as well:
We must confess we learned a lot from Compass. We had not realized that employers’ concerns about employees feeling fine had their roots in ancient history. But there it is, right in the opening words: these concerns date back “millenia” [sic], when employers failed to get their employees tested for “percolating” conditions before throwing them to the lions.
So the bad news is that feeling fine may be hazardous to your health. The good news is that your ICU bed may not need a DNR notice anytime soon because elsewhere Compass says it “has programs and solutions to help your employees overcome their I Feel Fine Syndrome.” And it is “very likely” these programs and solutions can “completely cure the problem…forever in our bodies.”
And not a moment too soon, because we’re never felt better in our lives, which means the clock is ticking. That’s the good news. The bad news is, if we join Compass’s program it sounds like we need to start contributing more to our 401K’s.
Summary
We’d like to think that all our exposés have made a dent in the wellness industry’s business model, but the forces arrayed in the other direction have so far overwhelmed us. The price of screening has plummeted almost to the $1-per-lab-value level for comprehensive screens, and as with anything, the lower the price, the greater the amount sold.
Couple those economics with the advent of genetic testing as part of wellness, big and profitable fines for non-participants, and the EEOC being defanged as a sop to the Business Roundtable, and it’s clear the wellness industry’s highly profitable hyperdiagnostic jihad against the American workforce has barely begun.
By contrast, Quizzify teaches employees that “just because it’s healthcare, doesn’t mean it’s good for you,” and to only get screened according to the USPSTF guidelines. That’s a message that employees would love to hear, but that wellness vendors can’t afford to tell them.
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Finally–a Free Wellness ROI Tool That Isn’t Made Up
We are pleased to present a free wellness ROI estimation model, as we promised about 3 months ago. This is the only tool of its kind in the industry. (Wellsteps has one, but let’s just say the good news is that NASA employees don’t have to worry about job security, because these people aren’t rocket scientists. If you zero out inflation, no matter what other variables you enter, the Wellsteps model always shows savings of $1359.)
You can also use this to compare two wellness programs, to determine whether your vendor is lying (they are — and we are happy to help you get your money back from them), and to pressure-test Quizzify.
Quizzify, where facts are your friend, and they’re fun, too
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Eureka! We got criticized! An entire blogful of harsh words
Please visit Michael Prager’s blog. Ironically, I don’t think we would take issue at all with his main point which appears to be that wellness should be done for employees instead of to them. (He is in the business of doing wellness for employees, not to them.) And, in fact, if he were actually thinking clearly about his own business success, he’d be pointing that out and trying to figure out ways to work together.
Second, note that our math and facts are never, ever criticized, even by our most virulent critics. What he criticizes is that we “mock critics who say that calling people ignorant is bullying.” Well, we call them the “ignorati,” not ignorant. “Ignorati” means they ignore facts, which is a brilliant strategy.
Third, he is breaking ranks with the ignorati, by not ignoring us. This creates a problem because he doesn’t actually point out a single thing we say that is wrong. Indecorous, perhaps, but wrong, no.
What’s both right and fun for employees? Quizzify, of course. Click and take our demo.
Michael, have at it: find a mistake in our math or a lie that we told about your integrity-challenged colleagues and we’ll apologize to it and link people to it. Go ahead, make our day. Because right now the fact that you, having shown that you are willing to criticize us, can’t find anything to actually criticize us about (other than our “bullying” observations that people who can’t do arithmetic shouldn’t be doing arithmetic), makes our case much better than we ever could.
Addendum: his is actually a very interesting blog on its own merits. He does do wellness for employees instead of to them ∞
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Ron Goetzel reports on Graco, the company with the country’s most expensive spouses
Talk about “burying the lead.”
Need we say more?
Ron Goetzel just reported on a company called Graco, where employees were subjected to a “pry-poke-prod-and-punish” wellness program. These are line employees in an “old economy” company–exactly the type of company where healthcare spending would be high. And it is high. According to the article, Graco spent $29,000,000 on healthcare for 2600 employees. That’s about $11,100 apiece, roughly what you’d expect. This estimate is with or without a wellness program, since as Ron’s recent HERO report noted, wellness programs have no positive impact on spending.
Yet later on in the article he writes:
In the immortal words of the great philosopher Rick Perry, oops.
$190 per member per month (and we assume that he meant just for employees, not members) is $2280/year/employee. Here are the possibilities:
(1) Graco has the country’s mot expensive spouses, costing about $18,000/year (to bring the average spend to $11,000 per employee contractholder per year) but hasn’t noticed
(2) Graco has some magical special sauce that kept costs way below average even before the wellness program started that Ron failed to tell us about (hence “buried the lead”)
(3) Ron Goetzel made yet another rookie mistake in his math, thus invalidating the entire study, just like most of his Koop Awards.
You can rule out that this $190 had anything to do with the wellness program. Smoking rates (the only thing that really affects spending) remained unchanged, and obesity only fell a few points. And a company can’t save money by overscreening people, paying for their drugs, and making them get unnecessary checkups. In any event, it wasn’t $190/month. It was $11,100/year.
$2280 vs. $11,100… We look forward to Mr. Goetzel’s explanation of how both these figures could be true, since it appears they are completely at odds with each other. In the immortal words of the great philosophers Dire Straits, if two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.
And once again, the mantra of Surviving Workplace Wellness holds true: In wellness, you don’t have to challenge the data to invalidate it. You simply have to read the data. It will invalidate itself.
Here’s a Quizzify number that adds up: a 100% guarantee you’ll save money
We will no doubt be accused of “bullying” him for invalidating this study, which he obviously spent a lot of well-compensated time on. So just to show our good intentions, we will offer him our course and certification in Critical Outcomes Report Analysis gratis. It seems he could learn a lot from it and we look forward to announcing his successful completion.
Update: Ron apparently “forgot” to include the actual data in his writeup, which showed that, um, how to put this tactfully, his entire conclusion is wrong. Looks like kids (who had no access to wellness) trended better than the adults who did have access. We added this as the second installment.
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Measuring Wellness-Sensitive Medical Events: The Grand Finale of the HERO Analysis
The eighth in the series deconstructing the HERO Outcomes Guidelines, covering Page 14. The full series can be found here. This installment in particular should be read in conjunction with installment #4 This Grand Finale will be presented in 3 parts…with a downloadable tool to help you calculated your wellness program savings as part 3.
PART ONE: HERO ACCEPTS OUR METHODOLOGY
In the stock market, no one is as valuable as the person who’s always right, except the person who’s always wrong. Therefore, until now we have greatly appreciated the opportunity HERO’s report has created for us to explain how to measure outcomes correctly.
So imagine our disappointment when one of their methodologies, the sixth of the seven listed, turned out to actually be valid. No surprise — this is the methodology I invented. Also no surprise given the industry’s standards for integrity, they didn’t acknowledge that particular factoid anywhere in their 88 pages. (And yet they accuse us of being impolite.) Here is the screen shot.
The philosophy of #6 is quite straightforward. If you were introducing a flu vaccine program, you’d measure the reduction in number of people who got the flu. If you offered a new program for conservative treatment of meniscal tears, you’d measure the reduction in the number of people who had meniscal surgery. That’s the way experimentation works. You hypothesize an outcome that the intervention should create…and then you measure that outcome to see if the experiment worked.
Except, of course, in population health, where any improvement in anything (cost, trend, utilzation) gets attributed to any wellness program that happened to be in place. The masters of this would be Mercer. Mercer once “found” massive, mathematically impossible, savings for North Carolina Medicaid’s medical home in a cohort that, as luck would have it, wasn’t even eligible for the medical home. And one wellness industry stalwart, Larry Chapman, says the simple act of completing a health risk assessment can reduce total healthcare spending by 50%, even when the information in the HRA is wrong, as is often the case.
And did you ever notice that when a company switches to a high-deductible health plan and adds some needle-poking, they attribute the reduction in spending to the needle-poking, not the fact that everyone in their company suddenly gets socked with a bigger annual deductible?
Enter wellness-sensitive medical event rates (WSMEs). This is the only methodology that tallies hospitalizations for conditions targeted by a wellness program – statistically avoided heart attacks etc. This is the only one of the seven HERO methodologies that would be acceptable to legitimate researchers. Hence, its use both in Health Affairs and by the GE-Intel Validation Institute. The former is the most respected health policy publication and the latter is the most (the only) respected outcomes evaluation organization. Further evidence of its validity is that there is no mention of it in the leading wellness promotional publication, the American Journal of Health Promotion, perhaps because – as HERO has attested – it doesn’t show savings.
History of event rate-based plausibility testing
Even though it isn’t attributed to me in the HERO guidebook, I invented this methodology in 2007. This is incontrovertible. No one else had anything remotely close to it. Unlike the automobile, TV, the computer, etc., this was not one of a series of incremental improvements to or the amalgamation of existing technologies.
And none of the other invention clichés apply either. The Chinese didn’t invent it in 1000 BC. Leonardo DaVinci didn’t sketch it in 1541. The Germans and the Allies weren’t racing to develop it at the end of World War II. By contrast, I’ve been presenting on it and using it for validation since then (meaning 2007). It figured prominently in Why Nobody Believes the Numbers too, before being highlighted in Health Affairs and the Validation Institute. For a modest fee, the detailed how-to can be downloaded from our website, though a Reader’s Digest version appears below.
While a number of employers and health plans use it now, several health plans – more than coincidentally three of the highest-rated in the country (Harvard Pilgrim, Blue Cross of Massachusetts, and Providence Health Plans) – have been measuring hospitalizations for conditions targeted by wellness/DM programs since the methodology’s inception.
So needless to say I was surprised and totally flattered that the 88-page HERO Report contained no attribution to me as the inventor of the WSME plausibility test. As mentioned previously, the strategy of the Wellness Ignorati is to ignore facts (hence their moniker), especially including my very existence. That strategy reduces the likelihood that one of their customers might click through to the site. They aren’t much for our recommending that companies learn our helpful insights, which they call “bullying.”
The wellness industry has had a love-hate flip-flopping relationship with WSME measurement.
Click on the Q to try our demo
First, until 2013, the entire Wellness Ignorati, quite in character, ignored this methodology, which is a powerful testament to its validity.
Then, in 2013, that strategy took a body blow: the exact methodology was used in Health Affairs. You may recall the same thing happened with another epiphany of ours — the expose of the invalid Koop Award-winning Health Fitness Corporation fabricated results. The Wellness Ignorati completely ignored our whistle-blowing expose until it appeared in Health Affairs, when they were forced to admit we were right and the whole thing was made up, or to use Ron Goetzel’s phrase in the passive voice, “was unfortunately mislabeled” for four years.
Just as Ron Goetzel — the leader of the Wellness Ignorati — caved when the Health Affairs light was shined on the Koop-HFC debacle, he caved on WSMEs when the Health Affairs light was shined on them. In this case, “caving” was acknowledging the fact that this methodology existed. He reviewed the aforementioned Health Affairs article that specifically analyzed WSMEs — hospitalizations for conditions targeted by the wellness program. In September 2014, he wrote:
But then he un-caved. Once the Health Affairs storm had passed, he invoked the Sergeant Schultz defense. In December 2014 he said: ,
He may have just forgotten in December that he reviewed them in September. But in March he and his colleagues re-remembered wellness-sensitive event rates, and put them right in the HERO report, for which we are immensely grateful.
Hopefully they won’t re-forget in June. (Their memory appears to be correspond with the change of seasons.) Hopefully instead, to paraphrase the immortal words of the great philosopher George Gershwin, our methodology is here to stay.
How do I feel about HERO rewriting history so that I am no longer the inventor of this methodology? Honestly, having firmly staked out a niche in the small but growing “integrity segment” of the wellness industry, I prefer them staying out of that niche as long as possible. So I’m glad they show no interest in facts.
In part two, which we will post in a few days, we will explain how we do WSME plausibility testing and why it’s the essential method for assessing the impact of your wellness and disease management efforts.
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Greatest Hits Collection: Staywell
Collaborating with Staywell may not be enhancing the American Heart Association’s reputation.
Occasionally we have to attend to our Day Jobs and can’t post regularly. Fortunately, we have access to a bolus of posts from mid-2014, the posts that went up on this site initially. There were too many stories to highlight, so we decided to inventory them, in order to fill in gaps when we didn’t have time for new posts.
High on that list would be Staywell. First was their collaboration with Mercer, in which they agreed to tell British Petroleum that they found $17,000/person savings. They knew those savings were mathematically impossible since the average person only spends $6000/year. They also forgot that they themselves had said it was only possible to save $100/person.
Following on the heels of that was a collaboration with the American Heart Association to create screening guidelines that (surprise) call for much more screening than the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommends.
In both cases, we welcomed — and in the latter case offered $1000 honorarium for — responses to our questions, but our good-faith offer was met with silence.
Also, in both articles Staywell continued to cite Katherine Baicker’s study that she herself no longer defends, with the added wrinkle of referring to it as “recent” in the hopes that no one looks at the endnotes and sees that it was submitted for publication in 2009 and covered studies from a decade before that. With any luck they’ll have enough integrity to stop citing that study now that RAND has invalidated it. A good rule of thumb is that anyone who cites Baicker’s study without noting that no one (including Professor Baicker) believes that 3.27-to-1 ROI any more is prima facie deliberately misleading people. It is no longer credible to say one doesn’t know that her study has been shown to be hooey and that she is no longer defending it (and actually says she has no more interest in wellness).
Our health benefit education will never break your heart
We recommend click-throughs to both studies. Each raises questions that Staywell refused to answer, after initial conversations which confirmed they knew about these issues. You’ll also see how the American Heart Association was shocked, shocked, that anyone would question their integrity (perhaps they haven’t read The Big Fat Surprise) but then let it go, rather than create a news cycle.
Staywell also helped give British Petroleum a Koop Award. Nice to be on the award committee AND be an award sponsor–makes it easy to give your customers awards. With one or two exceptions, we can’t remember the last time the Koop Award went to a company with no connection to a sponsor or committee member. Perhaps someone could let us know?
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Dan Ariely on how the Wellness Industry Crowdsources Reality
We recommend that everyone listen to Dan Ariely’s interview on NPR and TED talk “Why We Lie.” It explains exactly why the Wellness Ignorati could decide to collectively self-publish an entire guidebook full of misinformation and disinformation designed specifically to increase the revenues of wellness vendors.
Here are our take-aways from Professor Ariely’s TED Talk.
Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, the Ignorati started out honest. They genuinely believed that wellness saved money and that they were doing good. It was very counter-intuitive to believe otherwise. If you look at page 201 of Why Nobody Believes the Numbers, you’ll see I even mildly supported biometric screens. I hadn’t done the math. I just assumed early detection was a good thing and that Ron Goetzel and others was telling the truth, for which on page 83 I professed my admiration. As another example, ShapeUp’s CEO Rajiv Kumar would never have attacked us (largely for refusing to believe Kate Baicker, who even RAND now dismisses and who herself no longer appears to believe her own claim) if he had realized his own outcomes claims were false.
Like Walter White, it was easy to justify the first transgressions. Since the Wellness Ignorati genuinely believed in what they were doing, when the numbers didn’t add up, they either justified to themselves that it was OK to fudge them (like ShapeUp’s now-retracted claims about Highmark) or ignored glaring invalidating mistakes. The best example of the latter: Ron Goetzel finally recanting Health Fitness Corporation’s infamous participants-vs-non-participants self-immolation after years of ignoring it.
Or wellness vendors create a parallel universe where numbers don’t have to add up (like Keas), or completely misquote industry experts saying the opposite (like Vitality).
Like Walter White, they don’t actually believe they are bad people. Ariely calls this a “personal fudge factor.” With the possible exception of Wellsteps’ Steve Aldana (who may be honest but simply unable to recognize that no matter what numbers you enter into his model you get the same answer), they really think what they are doing is OK—even though the math clearly dictates otherwise.
Also like Walter White, they kept getting drawn deeper in. The more they lied, the more they have to keep lying. They needed to continue to defend what was looking increasingly indefensible. After giving Nebraska’s program a much-publicized and ironically named C. Everett Koop Award, it’s hard for Ron Goetzel and his committee to say “We goofed—we need to take it back because they made up the data and defrauded the state” even after the vendor, Health Fitness Corporation, admitted it.
Quizzify…truth serum for wellness.
Like Walter White, the Wellness Ignorati “suspend reality” (to use Ariely’s term) and “buy into a new reality.” Essentially the Ignorati crowdsource reality. They peer-review one another’s work, give themselves awards, and decide (to use Michael O’Donnell’s term) that anyone who challenges them lacks the “credentials” to do so. Or, as Ariely says: “If you were getting well-paid by Enron, wouldn’t you want to see reality as they present it?”
Avoiding the media is an excellent strategy. Once again, like Walter White, the Wellness Ignorati want to keep a low profile. Exposure is bad if the facts all go the other way. That explains Ron Goetzel’s refusal to debate, ever, and the Ignorati’s characterization of us as name-calling bullies when all we do is ask questions.
Yep, you can read this site up, down and sideways. The fact is no names are called other than the “Wellness Ignorati.” We’ve offered them the opportunity to propose a different name for their practice of denying facts, which they’ve declined. We do use the term “pretzel” to describe the very impressive twists and turns that Mr. Goetzel uses to wriggle out when he’s been caught calling failed or fraudulent programs “best practies” because they are run by friends, sponsors or clients. The alternative word for what one would be called when all your claims are made up is less flattering, and we’ve never used it with respect to Ron.
This explains why the Ignorati steadfastly refused to answer questions for a $1000 honorarium. Once again, like Walter White, they have so much as stake that $1000 is chicken feed. At Enron, if you questioned Ken Lay at an analyst conference, he would accuse you or not understanding their business, and cut you off from future meetings, rather than answer the question. We of course were not invited to participate in or even listen to the “discussion” about the HERO report.
Like Walter White, at some point the Wellness Ignorati needed to commit to their chosen path. The Wellness Ignorati have gone too far in their insistence that wellness saves money. There is no turning back. The existence of this site makes turning back even harder because retracting their lies means acknowledging them. And as soon as they do that, we do what we do best other than invalidate the Ignorati’s misstatements, which is: gloat.
Like Walter White, they are now doubling down. Examples: Ron Goetzel calling Nebraska a best practice after they admitted lying about saving the lives of cancer victims, in order to justify his original award to them. Steve Aldana can’t create a real ROI model now without admitting that his original model was not “based on every ROI study ever published” as he has maintained, but rather always yields a savings of $1359/employee no matter what inflation-adjusted figures you enter.
As the house of cards collapses, people on the fringes who were sucked in (in this case HR and some brokers and consultants) wake up and ask: “How could I have believed what these people were saying?” Many major and mid-level figures connected with Enron did exactly this. We see this every week in wellness, as people come to us and say: “I get it. I can’t believe I fell for this.”
So thank you to Dan Ariely. In one 8-minute TED talk, he explained the entire alternative crowdsourced reality of the Wellness Ignorati – without once even mentioning them by name. But I’m sure the Ignorati nonetheless think he bullied them.
As a hot-off-the-presses example of what Professor Ariely is talking about, Wellsteps just updated their model so that now instead of saving $1359 per person in 2019, they save $1359 per person in 2020. As with previous iterations of their model, the success of the wellness program is irrelevant to the outcome of the model. Just enter a 0% inflation rate and “1” for covered people (“1” so you can see the $1359 reveal itself without having to do division) — and then whatever figures you want to enter for spending, obesity and smoking.
Here you started out with astronomical healthcare costs and got a 99% reduction in smoking and obesity…and saved $1359
Here you save $1359 without changing smoking or obesity at all:
And here you saved $1359 even though there was nothing to save. The costs are as low as the model will allow you to enter (until they got caught, you could enter figures low enough that they model would calculate negative costs), and there was no smoking or obesity to reduce:
Naturally, Wellsteps is prominent both on the Koop Award Committee and the HERO Report Committee. Wellsteps’ “back story” is here.
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HERO challenges us to a debate — Webinar April 22
This is the fifth in a series on the HERO report on wellness outcomes measurement. The previous installments can be found here
Doesn’t really need a caption, does it?
The Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) has invited us to debate the merits of “pry, poke, prod, and punish” wellness programs, on April 22. The invitation is reproduced below and available in full here.
Not.
They didn’t ask us to debate. (They didn’t even invite us to attend.) By contrast, we have offered to debate many times. We’ve even offered literally a million-dollar reward for them to debate their outcomes metrics with us.
Here’s what really happened. We received emails from many people giving us the heads-up that HERO is holding a webinar during which they will spin their information published in their report where they say wellness loses money and is bad for morale into the opposite conclusion. If this seems confusing, it is.
Ironically, they said that we have “created confusion in the marketplace,” when in reality they were the ones who created the confusion, by providing information that they are now trying to walk back. The report seems perfectly clear – wellness loses money. Nonetheless the Wellness Ignorati are befuddled by their belated observation that it was they who supplied this information. No surprise here. Through the years we have noticed that the Wellness Ignorati are easily befuddled, especially by information.
By contrast, no one can say we confuse anything. We have always been consistent: “pry, poke, prod and punish” programs are losers for all concerned, except the vendors and consultants who naturally are running this webinar. For the Wellness Ignorati, it’s all about the money.
Yes, this is our new company where we do wellness the right way…and guarantee savings
One of the fundamental differences between us and the Wellness Ignorati is that we are pro-transparency and have nothing to fear from publicizing them, so we are attaching their invitation below and urging people to attend, whereas even as they disparage our observations, they refuse to mention the existence of this website.
No surprise there either: if people find out this website exists, they might visit and learn actual facts. Facts, of course, are the worst nightmare for the Wellness Ignorati. That’s how they earned the appellation–by employing a strategy of ignoring facts.
This is even true when they themselves published the facts.
Curiously, this is the second time in recent months that the Wellness Ignorati have written that wellness loses money. At some point if they keep insisting wellness loses money, we have to believe them. The last time, Michael O’Donnell’s journal concluded (we’ll use a screenshot):
We would attend this webinar ourselves except that we are not invited. In any event, our attendance track record is not encouraging. The last time we listened to a Ron Goetzel webinar, we were disconnected after asking that he not use our copyrighted material without attribution. Ultimately we had to get our publisher, John Wiley & Sons, to make him cease and desist.
Still, we’d love it if you would attend, and here are some questions you could ask. First about the HERO Report:
- Why did they say wellness damages morale and corporate reputations if they are now saying that it doesn’t?
- Why did they say a wellness program only costs $18/year when the biometric screens alone cost more than $18/year?
- How can they say that companies should allocate only $18/employee/year to a wellness program when their own invitation below says that to be successful, a program must be “comprehensive” and “well-resourced”?
- Why did they omit their own carefully compiled list of 11 elements of cost other than vendor fees from that $18 figure?
- If wellness only saves $12/employee/year before fees according to their own figures, how can it save money if it costs $18?
- Why are there so many rookie mistakes in this report, like “forgetting” to adjust the decline in cardiac events for the secular decline in cardiac events that the entire country is enjoying?
- If their methodology is so sound, how come they haven’t collected their million-dollar reward when all they have to do was apply fifth-grade math to a simple word problem without lying?
When facts interfere, just twist and turn them, like a pretzel
And while you’re in attendance anyway, there are 11 still-outstanding questions for Mr. Goetzel himself, that he has steadfastly refused to answer. Here are a few you could ask:
- Why does he keep insisting that the Nebraska wellness program – whose vendor admitting lying about saving the lives of cancer victims – is a “best practice” or “exemplar” program?
- Why does he always give Koop Awards to customers and clients of his sponsors and board members, even when they claim 100 times as much savings as they themselves said was possible?
- Who “unfortunately mislabeled” the key slide that invalidates the industry’s obviously fallacious participant-vs-non-participant methodology and why did neither he nor any other analytical luminary on the Koop Committee notice it until we pointed it out four times?
- Why has he refused to answer these questions even though Al Lewis has offered to answer any questions you could ask him?
In one respect, though, the Ignorati are finally making progress in the integrity department. This invitation is 100% Kate Baicker-free. Maybe, finally, they are accepting the reality that she has walked back her 3.27-to-1 ROI not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. (Four seems to be the magic number of times needed to point out a fact to the Wellness Ignorati before they admit its existence.)
INVITATION:
Don’t Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater – A Measured Response to Critics of Workplace Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Programs
April 22, 2015
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Central Time
(Members only event)
Recently, several individuals have raised doubt about the efficacy and cost-benefit of workplace health promotion and disease prevention programs (otherwise known as wellness programs). These critics cast doubt on the very core of work site wellness efforts and have generated widespread publicity. They argue against the benefits of prevention and workplace health promotion, question the validity of ROI estimates, and aim to restrict the use of outcomes-based wellness incentives. These criticisms have created confusion in the market. This session will re-state the business case for adopting evidence-based, comprehensive, and well-resourced workplace health promotion programs. It will also review the methods used to evaluate these programs in “real world” settings, but also acknowledge the limitations of “average” programs that may not produce expected outcomes. Finally, Dr. Goetzel will comment on value-on-investment (VOI) approaches to assessment of workplace programs in contrast to the more traditional return-on-investment (ROI) models.
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Star Wellness Illuminates the Health Hazards of Wellness
Once in every great while, when we’re least expecting it, a company comes along that makes us reconsider our viewpoint–and ponder the possibility that maybe we’re wrong about wellness. Maybe, finally, we’ve discovered a company that will motivate employees to get well. Maybe a company that adheres to screening guidelines. Maybe even a company that will solve America’s healthcare crisis.
Star Wellness is not that company.
Quite the contrary: If you are an employee of an organization that has retained this outfit, your best course of action is simply to pay the fine and have nothing to do with these people. Or take the tests to secure your money, and then don’t open the envelope with the results in them, because due to false positives, you are equally or more likely to be harmed than helped by taking their full panel of tests.
Star Wellness says doctors “typically order these tests during a routine physical.” If you find a doctor that does so, please contact the licensing authorities because for many of these screenings, a doctor would be sanctioned for routinely ordering and billing for these tests on all patients. However, this being the wellness industry, there are no authorities…but there are plenty of tests. Not being doctors, wellness vendors are allowed to harm employees up to the limit of HR’s willingness to pay them to do so–and, being wellness vendors, they take full advantage of this budget. (Among other things, the higher the budget, the more vendors can pay the employers’ brokers–and hence the more likely they are to keep the account.)
Leaving aside all the tests they do that the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) does not recommend doing annually if at all (which is to say, most of them), let’s focus on the ones the USPSTF specifically recommends not doing. In each case, we’ll use screen shots because otherwise no one would believe that any preventive services vendor could possibly be this out of touch with preventive services guidelines.
PSA screens for prostate cancer. Perhaps Star Wellness’s internet connection is down because nobody does these any more. Even the guy who invented the test recommends not doing it.
Carotid artery screening. Seriously? Even the Highmark/Goetzel Penn State program, the industry’s most coercive and ill-conceived program ever, didn’t recommend those.
Our favorite is abdominal aorta screening. These screens are so not-recommended for the <65 population that the USPSTF assumes nobody,no matter how stupid or dishonest, would ever do them. So they don’t even bother to waste valuable electrons posting non-recommendations of this screen for the <65 population. It would be like recommending not parking your car on a railroad crossing. Instead, all of their recommendations start with the assumption that people being considered for these tests (tests on individuals, not screens on everyone, by the way) are over 65 to begin with.
Even their basic tests are mostly USPSTF not-recommended as screens (and certainly not annual screens), but more interesting is some of the misinformation they’ve piled on top of these tests.
They say these tests are a “$350 value.” Since a checkup including tests costs $200 or less, the whole PCP profession would be going bankrupt if their math was right — and if doctors were actually doing these screens.
Of course they also make up their savings figures (all this overscreening somehow saves $250/employee net of the costs of the overscreening itself), but lying about outcomes is embedded in wellness vendor DNA. We can’t fault them for that. It isn’t possible to compete in this field without making up outcomes.
But they did make up at least one other statistic. As noted above, they said that 75% of Americans are deficient (or, more specifically, DEFICIENT!) in Vitamin D and need supplementation. However, the CDC and the rest of the triple-digit IQ grownup crowd say the opposite. The CDC notes that only 8% of Americans are deficient, while the Journal of the American Medical Association and the USPSTF also don’t recommend screening and supplementation.
In addition to not understanding preventive medicine guidelines, Star Wellness appears to not understand the (very few) regulations putting even the slightest of constraints on the wellness industry’s overdiagnosis-today-overdiagnosis-tomorrow-overdiagnosis-forever ethos. One of those very few constraints (ironically, a misguided one) is: wellness vendors can’t ask about family history. And yet, here they are…asking about family history. Now it’s possible they aren’t asking about family history and they mis-stated their own position, in which case by their own admission, they are doing this screen on people without a family history, people who shouldn’t get the screen at all. Their other screen on this slide, C-Reactive Protein, is also not recommended by USPSTF.
Not all the news about Star Wellness is bad. We always try to end on good news, and the good news is – if Star Wellness is to be believed – their needles are among the least contaminated in the entire industry!
A postscript
Sal, Wyoming’s not a country.
Star, Vitamin B12 is not a vaccine
While we’re on the subject of vaccines, according to the CDC, the biggest categories of people who are supposed to get Hepatitis A/B vaccines include toddlers and street drug users. If you are routinely hiring enough people fitting those criteria to be considering an on-site vaccination clinic, I’d say wellness isn’t your biggest problem.
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Is Wellness-Driven Life Insurance Hancock’s New Coke?
John Hancock Insurance recently announced a plan to sell life insurance based on healthy behaviors. You get a discount on life and disability insurance for exercising and reporting good blood values on an ongoing basis, not just once when you sign up.
While we have been quite vocal in saying wellness is a waste of money and potentially injurious to health and morale (and lately the two wellness trade associations themselves have candidly supported that position), we find Hancock’s strategy to be a shockingly good idea.
There are many distinctions between Hancock’s offering and health insurance. First, life and disability insurance are opt-in products. No one is forcing you to buy them in order to get health insurance at work, or fining you if you don’t. No one is violating USPSTF guidelines, screening the entire workforce, or making you get checkups that are worthless at best.
Second, the same numbers that don’t remotely add up for wellness add up quite elegantly for life and disability. Cut 50% out of your heart attack rate for the latter and you probably reduce overall claims payout by 5%. Cut 50% out of your heart attack rate for health insurance and you reduce overall claims payout by less than 1%. Additionally, Hancock can possibly accomplish that goal through underwriting. An employer doesn’t have that option. So besides being worth more, a 50% reduction is achievable.
Finally, they should be able to generate some good self-selection into this product. People have to be willing to give up some privacy, and our colleague Anna Slomovic is quoted on this topic in the article in the New York Times, but as long as you know what risk you are taking and as long as there is some recourse, it isn’t the same thing as being forced to reveal personal information for a wellness program.
Declare your independence from wellness intrusion. Quizzify.
One asterisk: the article says they are relying on Vitality to come up with the risk adjustments. I doubt seriously that is the case. Hancock has real grownup actuaries whose job it is to price these risk adjustments. We assume the article is wrong — Hancock isn’t going to rely on a vendor that can’t even quote Dee Edington correctly and doesn’t understand how to design a study.
Absent that asterisk, we are confident that they will be successful and wish them the best of luck.
They Said What? 