For critics of health-contingent workplace wellness programs, the conclusion is much more straightforward: even using prejudicial data sources and lacking a critique of the quality of the evidence, the impact of workplace wellness on the actual health of employees and the corporate medical care cost burden, is, generously stated, negligible.
This is not worth $6BN a year, which is the purported size of the US market for health-contingent workplace wellness programs (“purported” because like everything else in wellness, the size of the industry itself is totally opaque). There are clearly better ways to spend these funds; at the very least, it must be possible to get the same dismal results for far less money and with vastly less complexity.
With the push of the Affordable Care Act, the drive to implement health-contingent workplace wellness programs is accelerating. The RAND report, rather than contributing propellant, ought to give responsible business leaders pause as they consider whether to step up the pressure (i.e., increase incentives and penalties) for employees to participate in these highly intrusive, clinically dubious, spendthrift programs that yield health in RAND’s hypothetical world of models and simulations, but perhaps not so much, as RAND notes, in a more earthbound reality.
The lesson for executive leaders is that the nearly hagiographic employer belief in the value of health-contingent wellness is completely undone by the fact that RAND says virtually no employer (2% of their sample) measures program impacts and, as we have written previously, it doesn’t look like any employer, benefits consulting firm, or vendor actually knows how to do so.
