Despite the plethora of wearables, more information doesn’t necessarily change behavior. (Photo: Shutterstock)
If there’s a clear winner in the battle the wellness industry is waging against the ills that trouble employees, it’s the wellness industry itself.
In many cases, employees aren’t healthier, nor are employers reaping the benefits they expected from all the money they’re spending on such programs. That’s according to a report in Scientific American.
Researchers created a wellness program at the University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign and employees were randomly put in either the iThrive wellness program or a control group. “One year later,” they write, “when we compared the control group to the iThrive group, we found that the program didn’t lead to healthier employees or reduce health care costs.”
In fact, earlier studies that found wellness programs delivered a plethora of beneficial results were affected by “selection bias” — that wellness programs might simply be attracting employees who are already more health- and wellness-oriented, rather than the couch potatoes who might really need diet and fitness help.
The study of the iThrive group revealed that the employees who were engaged “were already quite healthy” and had “already incurred $1,373 less in medical expenses over the previous year compared to employees not interested in the program. Participants were also less likely to have extremely high medical expenses and were higher-earners, on average.”
Because higher-earning, healthier employees were more likely to participate, they were also more likely to benefit from any employer incentives to participate—and lower-earning, less-healthy employees were more likely to suffer higher premiums for their health care coverage although they needed the coverage more than their healthier colleagues.
Additionally, an opinion piece on NBC’s Think site by Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy Timothy Caulfield questions whether the wellness industry’s preoccupation with scientific gadgetry designed to measure steps, heart rates, calories, sleep quality, genetics and who knows what else could actually be detrimental thanks to TMI—too much information.
He points to a widely cited study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that participants wearing fitness trackers “lost significantly less weight than the research participants who weren’t. And the wearable wearers also weren’t any fitter.”
More information doesn’t necessarily change behavior, he argues. Fitness trackers don’t transform couch potatoes into marathon runners; instead, they actually demoralize some groups. He cites a study of adolescents that found fitness trackers or wearables increased peer pressure as groups competed to see who could outperform whom; some adolescents ended up less motivated to exercise than they were before they started.
Putting aside the question as to whether wellness programs should include fitness trackers or wearables, the jury is still out on the longer term effects of wellness program participation. However, “given the large amount of investment in workplace wellness programs, it’s worth establishing a rigorous understanding of the real impacts of these programs,” the University of Illinois researchers conclude.
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Marlene Satter
Marlene Y. Satter has worked in and written about the financial industry for decades.
