How AI can help manage employee health in a hybrid working world

Employers have seen enormous growth in innovative employee health and wellness programs aimed at a variety of goals, from improving employee fitness and managing chronic conditions to supporting value-based care models that carefully measure employee health outcomes. But despite this diversity of wellness offerings, health plans aiming to engage with member employees still face obstacles—whether in efficiently signing up new participants or keeping employees active in wellness programs.

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Now the reality of a hybrid work environment has added another layer to these challenges, complicating how employees engage with their health benefits. And this work environment is not going away. A recent survey by McKinsey & Company found more than half of employees want their organizations to adopt more flexible hybrid virtual-working models. Microsoft put the figure as high as 73%. Employers now face the interwoven challenges of keeping employees motivated in their work and highly engaged in their health to maintain a productive, happy remote workforce.

Adaptable and personalized technology offers a solution

An important first step is to identify which health and wellness programs are effective for this era of remote and hybrid work. It’s become clear that in-person workplace wellness programs may no longer be the most impactful areas of investment. Instead, employers should focus on virtual health offerings to benefit as many employees as possible and ensure remote employees are included. The types of wellness challenges people face are also shifting with extended remote working models.

In addition to existing health conditions, employees face increased physical and mental health issues arising through the steady build-up of bad habits. A survey found that 67% of people felt less connected to their colleagues, and 56% stated they found it harder to switch off after normal working hours. There are physical issues too, with increasing musculoskeletal problems resulting from people working in poor ergonomic settings such as sofas and bedrooms.

To manage these challenges, wellness programs must be flexible to the needs of the individual.A lower-income single parent will have very different challenges from an executive experiencing burnout. As with any wellness programs, activities should be skills-based and focused on educating individuals about tools and strategies to manage their unique challenges. This likely requires a different set of topics from traditional workplace wellness programs: topics like resiliency, mindfulness, and creating meaningful connections with people are immensely powerful in times like these.

There is a great need among remote workers for more proactive outreach on certain health and wellness topics. Frequently, mental health solutions wait for people to engage, which can be ineffective if remote workers are feeling disconnected. Outreach is more effective if used to actively check in with individuals in a way that is not intrusive, but also allows them to self-identify as needing support. Conversational outreach through SMS is an effective strategy, when a individuals can be directed to appropriate resources based on how they respond to questions built into the messaging program.

Driving remote workers to sign up for wellness programs remains just as difficult, if not more so than when people were in onsite roles. Without any face-to-face component, the overall engagement strategy becomes critical and must combine effective tailoring and coordinated communications for a great member experience.

Understanding the individual is essential

Tailoring wellness communications and programs to the individual requires understanding who they are. Demographic data and health status information are foundational toward this end. But these insights have the potential to be made much richer by adopting bi-directional engagement strategies. Conversational engagement uses intelligent systems to orchestrate conversations across member populations. In addition to reminders and notifications, members can actually be asked questions about how they prefer to manage their health and what kinds of challenges they experience. The member responses to these questions yield insights into health literacy, self-efficacy, and attitudes towards how they manage their own health.

These data provide immense value in determining the areas an individual may need support with and how to tailor their outreach. For example, if someone responds that they don’t understand why completing a preventive health visit is important, their engagement should focus on improving health literacy around the fundamentals of how to protect your health. Whereas someone who is activated towards their health but is too busy to schedule an in-person check-up may benefit from engagement about virtual health resources.

Conversational engagement can automatically distinguish between these different patient profiles and tailor outreach so it is well received by members across populations. Feedback strongly indicates that members value having a voice in their care, and this is reflected in engagement rates that consistently hit in excess of 40% even when looking population subsets. Creating these additional conversational touchpoints strengthens the relationship between the employee and their benefits provider, especially in a remote work setting.

With more sophisticated engagement approaches, the orchestration and coordination across channels becomes more important. All communications need to be cohesive in terms of topic, channel preferences and volume of communications. Tailoring to the individual requires a significant increase in content to cover the potential topics that may arise, and these more tailored touchpoints need to be incorporated into the broader engagement strategy in a way that makes sense for the member and is a good experience.

Fortunately, technology now has the capability to manage these engagements, and recommendation engines leveraging AI are able to deliver the ‘best next message’ to an individual based on both previous and upcoming communications, and where that individual is at that specific moment on their health journey.

These tools for outreach and orchestration also act as an immediate connection point when a disconnected member, more common than ever in the remote working world, decides to engage. Engagement platforms can be set up to be “always on,” essentially listening to inbound messages and requests. Leveraging conversational AI, the intent of the message is understood, and the most appropriate follow-up is triggered—either an automated message response continuing the conversation, or routing the inbound message to a live agent when appropriate. For many health plan members, their interactions are periodic, so being able to instantly react the moment a member engages is an important capability.

Better engagement for healthier lives

As we all adapt to this world of remote relationships, whether as employees, employers, benefits providers or health care providers, technology will be our most important enabler. Virtual relationships will become the norm—from work meetings to health check-ups—and how we reach out to and keep people engaged between these virtual touchpoints is crucial. Being tailored and meaningful is key to establishing strong relationships, and these touchpoints are opportunities for us to create immense value for individuals. Technology can connect people to resources that help them as individuals and deliver tools to tackle the challenges of remote work so they can live their lives to the fullest.

Chris Nicholson is CEO of mPulse Mobile.