Employee Wellness Software: A Comprehensive Buyers Guide

Wellness technology is constantly evolving. This is especially true post-pandemic when the work and wellness environment is so different than it was just a few years ago. Technology vendors that are leading the way in innovation are regularly releasing new features and functionality to improve administration, security and user experience.

Some platforms focus on specific topics such as health coaching or content management, but an all-in-one platform that consolidates all components into one place should consist of the following features and functionality: 

Wellness & Activity Challenges

Wellness challenges are a fun way to encourage healthy habits within a workforce, and are a common entry point for organizations beginning to offer a wellness program. Challenges can take many forms and cover many topics including physical activity, nutrition, weight management, sleep or financial wellness. 

Challenges are normally 2-6 weeks long and focus on a single aspect of health. They’re structured around completing daily and/or weekly activities to earn points, and can also feature educational content, and a social aspect, like a leaderboard. They can be done in teams, with a buddy, or individually.

Most platform vendors will have out-of-the box challenge templates that can be used as-is. Platforms with advanced flexibility allow customers to customize out-of-the box challenges or create fully customized challenges. 

There are four common types of challenges:

• Personal Challenges –Participants follow a specific journey through activities or education and track their progress. 

• Buddy Challenges – Participants can initiate and ‘challenge’ a buddy to a simple step-based or action-based challenge.

• Team Challenges – Users can participate in a team and compete against other teams (department vs. department, location vs. location, etc.). Team challenges are an effective way to promote team building and foster a culture of health in the workplace. Plus, it’s always entertaining to watch teams encourage each other and poke a little fun at each other in the name of some healthy competition.

• Individual Challenges – These challenges allow participants to sign up for a friendly competition on their own or join and participate against other users.

Challenge Engagement

Wellness technology can drive challenge engagement through a variety of methods including gamification techniques, incentives, goal tracking, activity tracking, points accumulation for achievement of milestones, badges, or incentive awards (gift cards, merchandise, charitable donation) plus the following:

• Maps which offer virtual adventure races
• Interesting educational content
• Surveys / Quizzes / Polls
• Group communication message boards
• Social networking tools
• Push notifications via email and/or text
• Incentives/rewards
• Personalization
• Evolution of design templates
• and more

Communication & Engagement

Employers that effectively use engagement strategies and tailored communications can drive higher wellness engagement rates. When communications appeal to an employee’s unique intrinsic motivations it can help them understand the personal benefits of participating in a wellness program. In order to appeal to an individual employee, it’s vital that communication methods can be customized. 

A wellness platform should be equipped with a wide variety of communication capabilities such as: 

• Mobile – A platform needs to be mobile responsive and accessible via an app. The ability to send communications through text is another great way to make programs accessible to all users and to keep them engaged.  

• Email – Tried and true, email is an essential method of communication. Tools that allow emails to be sent to an individual and/or via bulk email are helpful. For health coaching, a secure email is key.

• Message boards – Message boards are a forum-style communication that makes it fun for users to interact with each other in a community setting to provide motivation and encouragement. Ideally, message boards can be assigned company-wide, by activity challenge, by team or special interest groups. 

• Push notifications – Various platforms can generate nudges, alerts or messages for certain programs and events. These can be especially useful when notifying employees of assignments or incomplete tasks.

• Video Chat – Video chat can be useful for health coaches to collaboratively develop action plans and share health results. 

• Gamification – Gamification provides a fun, interactive, and engaging user experience. Elements of gamification include a point system, virtual treasure hunts, wellness badges and adventures to keep the user motivated.

When it comes to communication, it helps to communicate regularly (but not so often that users tune out) and to use a variety of methods.

Health Education Content & Resources

An important part of health and wellness programs is education. If participants are better informed about why and how they should improve their health, they’ll be empowered to make better decisions and positive changes.

Delivering digital health content and resources is typically accomplished in one of the following ways:

Out-of-the-Box Content

Most technology vendors provide some sort of content out-of-the-box which could include simple health tips through to comprehensive articles and resources. This out-of-the-box content may be developed by the vendor’s in-house writers, via a third-party writer or a third-party content provider.

It’s a good idea to ask the vendor who writes their content. 

Oftentimes, out-of-the-box content is shared with all participants, whether it’s relevant to them or not (e.g. diabetes articles are being shared with people who don’t have diabetes). While it’s better than nothing, this can work against you with engagement. If participants receive content that isn’t relevant to their specific health needs, it may be a barrier to engagement.

In-House Content Development

To deliver content that is specific to a workforce (e.g. Christian, disabled persons, common health issues for office or manufacturing workers, etc.) some organizations create their own content in-house that is highly relevant. To distribute it to a workforce, it’s important to work with a technology vendor that enables you to develop and deliver your own content to participants – not all vendors offer

Third-Party Content Provider

When there aren’t internal resources to produce content in-house, working with a third-party content provider may help. Depending on the technology vendor, they may have content partners to work with (usually because they have an established integration) or they may offer the flexibility to use a preferred provider. When going this route, it’s essential that the content can be seamlessly accessible in the app or portal to provide a seamless user experience. 

This option provides excellent flexibility to work with a content provider that is most suitable for a specific audience; especially if it’s a priority to deliver micro-targeted content very specific to a health risk or topic of interest. 

Health Assessments & Biometrics

The importance of identifying at-risk employees early can’t be overstated. Health assessments present an opportunity to equip the employees who need it most with actionable information for improving their health. Aggregate data collected from health assessments can inform managers about which health topics will be most helpful to address, and ultimately helps employers achieve reduced healthcare costs and a greater VOI from their wellness program.

Wellness platforms offer toolsets that allow site administrators to schedule one-on-one events such as biometric screenings or total health assessments, which delve into many aspects of health, including mental and emotional well-being, financial health, chronic disease risk and prevalence, and more. 

Health Assessments

A thorough health assessment package will include a suite of total health assessments that use a scientific, evidence-based approach to gain a deeper understanding of employees’ health status, risk levels, and readiness to change. There are many topics that assessments can cover, each contributing to total health. 

Although flexible wellness technology allows organizations to create, modify and distribute any type of health assessment or questionnaire, the three most common types of health assessments are:

• Health Assessment and Lifestyle Questions – Based on biometrics (blood pressure, total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, triglycerides, glucose, weight, height, body fat, and BMI) and lifestyle factors (nutrition, physical activity, stress, sleep, tobacco and alcohol use).
• Mental Health and Emotional Questions – Based on stress coping, relaxation, resilience, energy to spare, thinking clearly, feeling good about myself, relationships and family, career, social, confidence, interest in new things, cheerful outlook and depression screening. 
• Paper-based Questions – Some platforms will also include the option to manually enter a paper-based questionnaire or import it into the platform via a third-party tool. 

A common requirement is for health appraisals to be NCQA-certified.  The National Committee for Quality Assurance is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. Organizations incorporating the NCQA seal into advertising and marketing materials must first pass a rigorous, comprehensive review and must annually report on their performance. 

Biometrics 

Data gathered from biometric testing can be crucial for creating results-oriented wellness programs and have become a staple in corporate wellness programs. Wellness platforms that support biometrics will include the scheduling and storing of any type of biometric data from a variety of sources including: 

• Activity (active minutes, average heart rate, resting heart rate etc.)
• Sleep (sleep duration, awake times, restless times)
• Blood (blood pressure, blood glucose and blood lipids)
• Weight (weight, body-fat percentage, BMI and waist circumference)
• File-feed capabilities 

Platforms that include file-feed capabilities can receive large file-feeds from other vendors in the event that a third-party vendor is facilitating a biometric screening event and is unable to directly plug data into the platform as the event is going on. 

Health & Wellness Coaching

One of the most effective wellness programs is health and wellness coaching! It’s typically delivered in-person, virtually, or self-directed. 

Tools for Health Coaches 

For health coaches to effectively implement their wellness strategies they must have the right tools. A robust wellness platform will typically include tools and functionality to support coaching programs throughout their entire lifecycle. Health coaches can create and administer their own programs and use platform communication methods such as telephonic, video or in-person communications to administrative tasks such as scheduling of appointments, providing content and managing notes and tasks. 

Using technology health coaches can create and administer their own programs using platform tools such as:

• Scanning and uploading document files
• Caseload assignment where users can select appointments based on coach or time frame
• Client visibility to see what the user is doing to aid in setting goals and discussing progress
• Recording of notes and action items
• Creating and renewing programs, educational campaigns and self-learning programs
• Scheduling appointments and sending reminders
• Events Calendar for events such as lunch and learns, group activities, or classes
• Tracking outcomes and goals
• Telephonic, video, and chat communication tools
• Screen sharing to share health results and collaboratively review action plans

Essentially, technology facilitates all the administrative components for a health coach so they can focus on doing what they do best – coaching their clients to achieve improved health.

Tools for Self-Directed Health Coaching

Technology can also help you develop self-directed coaching programs that focus on key areas or topics (e.g. smoking, sleeping, stress, etc.) and typically focus on education and goal setting. 

Depending on the platform, self-directed programs can be sequential and could involve completing tasks such as reading articles, completing forms, watching videos, setting tasks (e.g. getting a physical) and personal goals. Completing specific steps in a self-directed coaching program and/or through to completion can also be linked to incentives (e.g. participants that complete self-directed coaching programs receive points or rewards) which should all be facilitated through the wellness technology for a seamless user experience.

Incentive Programs

Behavior change can be difficult to accomplish without appropriate help. Unless intrinsically motivated, some employees will have a hard time making healthy lifestyle changes. This is where incentives can help. 

The difference an incentive program can make on a wellness program’s success can be significant. Most successful wellness programs provide some type of incentive program and there are numerous ways of going about designing one. Properly structured incentive programs built using the right tools can have a large impact on specific actions or behaviors from users. 

Wellness technology will often include options to earn points that represent progress or dollars earned. Users can be rewarded points for any actionable item on the platform as well as for off-site events. When certain levels of points are reached, users can redeem them through a third-party incentive fulfillment vendor when their services are integrated into the platform.

For example, technology offers the flexibility to determine how to track and award points through a variety of options such as:

• Scheduling a biometrics appointment
• Completing a health assessment
• The number of hours slept, amount of exercise or type of food eaten
• Amount of weight loss

Essentially, incentives are about encouraging healthy habits on an ongoing basis, so participants eventually transition from being extrinsically motivated to intrinsic which is the foundation for creating long-term, permanent change. Some governments provide legislation around what can and can’t be offered as incentives so be sure to check local regulations. 

Incentive Fulfilment Options

Tracking incentives is just one part of an incentive program – you also need provide rewards to participants to acknowledge all their hard work!

Some organizations handle this in-house by buying a supply of gift cards or merchandise to give to participants. This works well for smaller groups but can quickly become heavy with administration and isn’t very personalized.

Organizations willing to invest more in their wellness program and incentives tend to partner with a third-party fulfillment companies that remove the administrative burden while giving participants the freedom to pick and choose how they want to be rewarded in a more personalized manner.

Reporting & Metrics

Reporting and metric functionality are crucial to understanding how your wellness program is performing and how user health is progressing at a member, group, geographic level or any preferred data segregation method. This allows for improved decision making and rapid feedback on what’s working and what needs attention. 

A comprehensive reporting engine should provide an endless range of measurable data points to help you define exactly what it is you want to track and how you want to report it. There are numerous options for reporting such as:

• Data from third-party systems
• Custom/ad hoc reports
• End user reports/individual participant reports
• Data filtering
• ROI
• Predictive analysis
• Performance measures/stratification
• Data exports
• Benchmarking
• Administrative dashboards

Given a platform’s ability to pull data from within and via third-party integrations, there should be limitless opportunities to analyze data on anything from illness and absentee costs to reducing workplace accidents or trends in employee engagement. A platform will offer a chance to examine how long-term trends influence effectiveness within the workplace and demonstrates where changes can be made. 

Once the team has determined specific metrics, it’s time to examine long-term trends that influence the workplace and make decisions on what changes should be made. Reporting the results of wellness programs is an important part of designing future programming and gaining leadership support. 

Other Desirable Features

Beyond the core features and functionality in wellness technology, here are some other noteworthy features:

White-Labeling and Branding Capabilities

• For wellness providers that plan to re-sell a platform to clients, the ability to tailor each portal to match each client’s brand and unique requirements is necessary.

• This is an important feature as the capabilities to do this varies from vendor to vendor. Some only enable you to replace a logo and text colors; however, other vendors give you incredible flexibility to change branding and much more.

Audit Trails

Wellness technology should have logs and auditing capabilities to track site changes, including modifications and deletions, with details about what was changed and by who.

Restrictions/Limits/Scalability

For wellness providers planning on growth, scalability and system restrictions/limitations is essential to know in advance. 

Ask the vendor what kinds of limitations they have?  Can they scale as you grow? Can you maintain multiple database instances to track each client? Can you logically segregate each instance so you can deliver a customizable view for each client? Ask for proof and examples.

This is important because if you can’t segregate each client site, then you may have reporting limitations. For example, you won’t be able to segment your reports for each client site – you will only be able to report on the platform which isn’t conducive to determining ROI for each client.

Third-Party Integrations

New services are constantly entering the marketplace offering ‘the next best thing’ and include everything from financial wellness and stress management to incentive fulfillment and wearable devices. One of the biggest issues for wellness platforms today is the number of inter-related solutions that go into delivering successfully integrated wellness programs that can offer wide-ranging services. 

Platforms can use several tools to share real-time data through third-party integrations such as single sign on (SSO), Application Programming Interface (API’s), web services, and flat file import/export solutions. There are also data aggregators such as Validic that can provide additional integrations to popular devices and apps and their data for an additional cost.

An advanced platform will typically have a few options for integrations including a:

• Application Programming Interface (API)
• JS Framework
• Widgets API
• SAML2 Overview
• Single Sign On (SSO) on a Web Service

Extensive development work among various services is required to contribute to a seamless user experience and provide cohesive data analytics. It’s important to understand what the capabilities and limitations are of a platform when it comes to integrations.

Wellness platforms are being asked to ‘talk’ with a myriad of systems such as:

• Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)
• EAP systems
• Incentive Fulfillment Providers
• Clinical Systems
• Intranets and internal systems
• Wearable Devices
• Wellness apps / corporate wellness apps
• EMR systems
• Insurer claims data

Integrations with these services is a key strategy for platforms that don’t offer a comprehensive solution. Through API’s, platforms can directly integrate with additional services in the marketplace and continue to provide a seamless user experience while meeting ever changing user demands for services. 

If transferring data to/from a laboratory or health system, a Health Level Seven or HL7 interface is essential to ensure that the integration is following the international standards for data transfer.

Each integration tends to have unique requirements, but once it’s understood how two systems need to interact with one another, a solution can be found. Anything is possible with wellness technology when the right puzzle pieces are there. 

Privacy & Security

Given that wellness platforms manage personal health information, privacy and security is of the utmost importance. Read 4 Reasons Why Wellness Portal Security Should Be Your Top Priority to help identify what to look out for.

There are various ways that wellness platforms can ensure privacy and security, including:

• • Using a least-privileges methodology 
  • Application access that is granted through a combination of roles and permissions
  • Granting only user level permissions for new users
  • Password strength requirements that are fully customizable
  • Availability of multi-factor authentication
  • The use of independent databases for each customer
  • A wellness vendor that implements strong security and privacy policies and procedures

For more detailed information on this important but complicated subject, read Best Practices for Wellness Technology Security. For global organizations, more detailed compliance practices are necessary. Our White Paper: Global Privacy, written with the help of global information privacy experts, can help.

In preparation to discuss privacy and security requirements, it’s helpful to know the reality of data security, for those wondering How Safe is my Data? Really? 

HIPAA Compliance

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data in the United States. Any company that deals with protected health information (PHI) in the US must ensure that all required physical, network, and process security measures are in place and followed. 

A platform itself cannot be a HIPAA-compliant entity, but can be configured to be 100% HIPAA compliant, and the company that creates the platform can be a covered entity. However, platform providers are not typically covered entities under HIPAA as it’s up to customers and their programs to be HIPAA compliant. Platforms support HIPAA compliance by providing privacy and security components that follow national requirements. CoreHealth helps dozens of companies meet their compliance requirements and stay as secure as possible.