One of the things that struck me at Thursday’s health briefing was the trend of companies taking an active role in the health of their employees. As we’ve been thinking about preventative health (which we’ve been tending to think of under the heading life optimization), it’s pretty clear that people aren’t so good at taking care of themselves. For better or worse, they tend to value today over tomorrow. The same isn’t true for businesses, however, where a sick employee can carry a hefty price tag. With that in mind, some businesses are beginning to invest in the wellness of their employees in all sorts of different ways.
One of those companies is General Mills, who were actually represented at the event. On one of the panels they mentioned an article about them in the New England Journal of Medicine which I quickly pulled up and purchased. It was super interesting and actually started to put some meat on the bones of some of the preventative health ideas we’ve been throwing around.
Essentially these companies are putting rewards (and sometimes penalties) for not keeping healthy. While I’m sure that sounds a bit big brotherish for some, I have to say it doesn’t bother me a whole lot (after all, employment is an agreement between both parties). What’s more, it reflects some of the stuff going on in government with cities all over the world banning smoking (and even trans fats in New York City).
Anyway, one of the core features of the General Mills program s a thing called the “health number”:
Employees at General Mills assess their risk factors and compute their “Health Number” by answering seven behavior-related questions — concerning exercise, diet, alcohol intake, tobacco use, stress management and mood, seat-belt use, and cancer screening — plus three questions concerning body-mass index, blood pressure, and blood lipid levels. Employees with a Health Number indicating intermediate risk are advised to consider lifestyle changes, and those with high risk are urged to initiate such changes, either on their own or with the company’s help.
This was especially interesting as we’ve been thinking a lot about how you begin to make health a little bit more like a game. Actually one of the conversations we had at the briefing was about just this, where we were told about some company (whose name I can’t remember) that does something similar and then creates an anonymous leaderboard for you to see how you stack up against the competition. Not sure how effective this stuff is, but would love to find out more.
Anyway, lots of good stuff to think about.
