Corporate wellness programs are bunk, says Al Lewis, CEO of Quizzify, a consumer health education company.
Lewis is a former Harvard economics instructor who started Quizzify, a website that provides visitors quizzes that guide them toward productive, cost-effective health care decisions (and away from unnecessary and costly ones).
In an article earlier this year for the American Journal of Managed Care, Lewis asserted that no corporation can point to savings achieved from company weight loss programs. In fact, no company has ever been able to even achieve sustained weight loss across a large population for two years, he argues, since most reports of company achievements do not take into account workers who did not participate or dropped out of the wellness program.
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An example Lewis highlights is a program run for Highmark, a Pittsburgh-based health care company. The company did not report any impact on employees who did not partake in the program, and only shifted 163 of the company's 19,000 employees into lower weight categories. Such a small change might be a smaller change than random weight variation, Lewis suggested.
"Oddly, this modest improvement was nonetheless considered a newsworthy event by ShapeUp," he commented.
"The wellness 'industry standard' modus operandi is to report only successes and not failures," he added.
Furthermore, Lewis argues, there is little evidence that obesity is a drag on business. But perversely, the consequences of wellness programs, including over-screening and crash-dieting, may harm employee morale.
It's not necessarily that Lewis is against the concept of encouraging employee health. But instead of subjecting employees to what he calls "weight-shaming," companies should provide activities that workers will want to participate in for fun. Those would improve the health of employees and boost their morale.
In addition to urging businesses to abandon traditional wellness programs, Lewis recommends that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act be reshaped to incentivize programs that encourage "harm avoidance."
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