PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT

HERO interview with Quest Diagnostics

Interview participant:     

Wendi Mader

Senior Product Manager

Janet Richardson-Barce

Director,Product Management and Marketing  

For this issue of HERO On Health, we interviewed Wendi Mader, senior product manager, and Janet Richardson-Barce, director, product management and marketing, with Quest Diagnostics about their employee health management program called, HealthyQuest. Quest Diagnostics, a world leader in diagnostic testing services that help individuals and doctors make better health care decisions, employs approximately 41,000 people around the world.

HealthyQuest was initially introduced 10 years ago to Quest employees at select locations, and was later extended to employees companywide in order to help colleagues and dependents become more knowledgeable about their health—and the program remains a key employee initiative today.

The cornerstone of the HealthyQuest program is the company’s Blueprint for Wellness biometric health screening, which is also offered commercially to other employers. When Blueprint for Wellness was first launched in 2001, prior to the formal launch of HealthyQuest, participation was low. Mader and Richardson-Barce believe this is because the program was not fully socialized with the employee base and the company did not initially offer employees an incentive to participate.

A few years later Quest began offering a $260 premium reduction incentive to employees for completing a health risk assessment and biometric screening.  And today, the company has been able to achieve 70 percent participation and employees can earn as much as $650 in incentives.

Based on this positive response, Quest began to migrate toward an outcomes-based incentive structure in 2010 that focused on achieving a healthy weight or improving an at-risk weight. The Blueprint for Wellness program provided the platform to administer the outcomes-based program, which included a health questionnaire, biometric screening (including objective measures for height, weight, and waist circumference), participant reporting and the ability to measure and report. For participants that do not achieve the stated weight goals, a reasonable alternative is provided, namely engagement with a health coach.

Are the company’s efforts working? In addition to the increased participation levels in both the Blueprint for Wellness screening and in our lifestyle coaching programs, Quest has seen specific health risks (such as obesity) improve. Additionally, the company completed a four-year ROI analysis in 2010 and found that the HealthyQuest program, specifically the Blueprint for Wellness screening, was generating a return on investment of $2.60 for each dollar spent on the program’s delivery.

The value of screening was affirmed again by Quest Diagnostics in a study published in 2011, Value of Laboratory Tests in Employer-Sponsored Health Risk Assessments for Newly Identified Health Conditions: Analysis of 52,270. This study showed that without employer-sponsored laboratory testing, more than one in three working-age adults may have unidentified disease(s). The percent of participants with newly identified disease risk (36 percent) in this research was significantly higher than those who self-identified (24 percent) as having one or more of three* common chronic conditions.¹

(*Hyperlipidemia, Diabetes, and Chronic Kidney Disease)

HERO:  What have been the keys to your success in creating an effective employee health management program?

Mader:  The very nature of our business at Quest Diagnostics helps pave the way for our success. Because we offer wellness services to other companies, we have been able to apply the best practices that we use in other organizations to our own workforce via HealthyQuest. For example, we have a great set of wellness champions at each of our business units who are responsible for implementing the program at their locations and building support on an ongoing basis. In this way, Blueprint for Wellness and HealthyQuest push each other to be better.

                       

The program also benefitted from a change in corporate philosophy that allows us to transmit data to best-in-class third party vendors, which has helped us broaden the services available to employees through HealthyQuest.  As a result, we produce even richer data that we can integrate to our overall health and productivity programs. This is exciting because we’re starting to see things being targeted in different ways, some of which are important but not widely implemented (such as diabetes screening at a certain levels). Ultimately, that means we’re learning to do wellness better and to integrate data intelligently.

HERO:  When you look back at your program outcomes, what results or outcomes do you feel are the most significant?

Mader:  At a high level, we’ve seen a migration of biometric values from “out-of-range” status to “in-range” status.  This is significant because an out-of-range status is often the first indication a person has that they do, or could have, a problem. When we tell someone that they have an out-of-range value, they tend to take action. One reason we’ve had success in this area is because we target employees by their work functions and risk factors and how they migrate. For example, people in sales have different risk factors than do our scientists and lab technicians or phlebotomists or customer service representatives. We also look at shifts and how the risk factors and migration patterns differ based on the time shift that employees work.

More specifically, we are seeing a downward trend in BMI among employees who are obese. While some of these employees technically still qualified as obese, their BMI is coming down and their level of obesity is shifting downward.

HERO:  What lessons have you learned over the years that you can share with other employers who have made a commitment to improving employee health?

Mader:  There are a few basic principles that we follow at Quest Diagnostics and other employers could apply to their own programs:

1.    Communicate in simple terms. Keep your messaging open. Think about how you frame your message so it’s personal and engaging. You cannot over-invest in communication because if you don’t communicate well and consistently about your program, you will not succeed. Support your investment in employee wellness with a sound communications strategy and thorough implementation plan.

2.    Take your time. Stage your program so employees can get comfortable with it and fully understand it. And think about how you will evolve your program over time; you don’t have to roll out everything at once. This also gives you time to educate employees along the way.

3.    Provide participation options. Give employees the opportunity to find a way to meet the program goals through activities that are personally interesting and appealing to them.

4.    Understand the importance of privacy. This is critically important to people when it comes to their personal health information. Creating firewalls between employees, your service providers, employee data and your corporate management is crucial.

¹Quest Diagnostics PLoS One Study, December 2011.