7 Tips to Create an Awesome Wellness Program

As wellness becomes a more formal staple within the healthcare landscape and business environment, we are hearing from clients and participants of wellness programs about the components that would truly enhance their experience.

As wellness becomes a more formal staple within the healthcare landscape and business environment, we are hearing from clients and participants of wellness programs about the components that would truly enhance their experience.

Given our role as a cloud solution company, we then start thinking about wellness not just from a process and health information standpoint, but also from the technology angle. So what are some of the cool things that are possible?

Below is a brief list of some of the exciting things that technology can help promote in wellness to design truly immersive and engaging programs.

Wearables Integration

Most wearables have an API that allows you to talk to the device and extract information. The ability to take this information and automatically align it to wellness “challenges” and demonstrate achievement towards goals has tremendous value. Many wellness programs suffer decreased engagement due to participants lack of desire to self report information. If you can automatically take data from the activities they are performing on a daily basis, this is a great start.

Portals, Portals, and more…Portals

A portal is really just an entry point into a subset of information, tailored and branded for that user. More and more health information is being created, but the key is figuring out how to present this information in a meaningful way so that it is actionable. Portals offer a user friendly environment allowing participants to access all the information about their wellness journey, while also providing a forum for preventative health behaviors, care management, and other health information in one consolidated location.

Tailored Content

“So I have high blood pressure: now what?” “I walked 90,000 steps this week – am I healthier?” These are the types of questions that are being raised by participants due to greater access to information, but how do we turn that data into actionable results to truly be healthy? A large component is tailoring content that teaches participants the way to fix, modify, or adjust their routines to keep driving towards a healthier lifestyle. Internally generated or external content that allows participants a “curated” approach to wellness is critical.

Device Agnosticism 

You say IOS. I say Android. To a wellness offering, it shouldn’t matter. Creating device agnostic tools that allows users to access the information on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone is extremely important. Its not just about making the information useful once you get it, its also ensuring streamlined access to it in the first place. The information needs to be presented in a consistent format no matter where the participant is accessing it.

Analytics

The ability to present data in new and exciting ways, as well as layer data on top of each other to tell new and intriguing stories, is important in the world of personal health. This notion of data visualization can help promote actionable responses to change behaviors.

External App Integration 

We love Apps. But what if the data from those Apps could be integrated into our personal health journey as well? Remember when you posted on Facebook that you had “the best fried chicken ever” or  checked into the gym on Four-Square, what if this aligned to your wellness journey. Calories from the fried chicken populated your calorie calculator while the gym check-in satisfied your weekly goal to “workout three times this week”.

Rewards

It’s rather straightforward personal economics. Align incentives and you get the right behavior. The same is true for one’s wellness journey. Whether it be granting free lunches, gift cards, additional days of PTO, or health insurance discounts, the ability to grant participants some form of positive incentive for meeting their goals will help drive engagement and make the overall offering more appealing to your members.

This is merely a sampling of some of the components that we are investigating to improve the wellness offerings and tools of some of the largest healthcare companies as they seek to better manage their population.

If you could pick the best wellness program possible, what would it entail?

wearable tech for health / shutterstock