Wellness Program Success Hinges on Long-Term Participation

August 06, 2019 - Members highly engaged in Humana’s long-term wellness program, Go365, spent on average $116 less per member per month in healthcare costs than low-engaged participants, a five-year study showed.

Go365 is Humana’s wellness and loyalty program which officially launched in 2017. Previously, known as HumanaVitality, Go365 serves five million members and offers a health assessment, preventive screenings, fitness activities, and incentives for healthy living.

The study tracked over 10,000 Humana employees over the course of five years, with two years to establish the baseline and three years to observe the effects of enrollment in Go365.

The results will be encouraging to employers who have invested heavily to keep their wellness programs running.

“Managing healthcare costs is a priority for employers who strive to offer competitive benefits while fostering a healthier, more productive workforce,” Jeff Reid, senior vice president of Wellness Solutions for Humana, said in a statement. “Based on the strength of the findings of the Go365 study in showing that long-term employee participation in our wellness program results in a healthier, more productive workforce and reduced healthcare costs, Go365 is a proven partner in realizing these positive outcomes.”

The researchers divided the data into four segments: lifestyle, clinical risk, healthcare claims costs and usage, and productivity.

Lifestyle risk factors include nutrition, physical activity, stress, and tobacco use. The program saw an increase in daily fruit and vegetable intake as well as a leap in minutes of physical activity per week. The number of members spending 150 minutes on a physical activity per week jumped by 25 percentage points between the baseline years and the analysis years.

To test the change in clinical risk, the program requested members to take a biometric screening each year that they participated. The screening included a blood test and weight, height, and waist measurements. These screenings determined potential risk factors such as high cholesterol, blood pressure, or body mass index.

Clinical risk did not experience as significant a shift, which the report author attributed to an aging population. The largest shifts took place in the systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings. By the end of the study, the number of members with an ideal systolic blood pressure was 10.2 percent higher and ideal diastolic blood pressure readings increased by 9.8 percent.

Claims were equalized through propensity score matching and capped at $100,000 per claim to create comparable groupings and eliminate outliers.

The study found that highly engaged members paid 22 percent less in healthcare spending than members with low engagement, whose payments increased by 49 percent over the five-year study. For chronic conditions, highly engaged members had 54 percent reduced costs and low-engaged members’ healthcare spending rose by 32 percent.

Hospital admissions rates were 30 percent lower for high-engaged members than low-engaged. Though the results in the third year showed moderately engaged members as having higher hospital admission rates, the medium-engagement rates dropped a total of around 33 percent over the course of the first three years of the study.

By the fifth year, highly engaged members had 35 percent fewer hospital admissions than participants with low engagement participants.

Because highly engaged members were attending annual and preventive checkups more regularly, they took 55 percent fewer unhealthy days off from work than low-engaged members in the fifth year. As a result, they had higher workplace productivity than their low-engaged counterparts.

These results are important as payers and employers decide the best ways to use wellness programs to decrease costs and raise their employee population health over a longer period of time.

These results run counter to what other researchers have found with regard to wellness programs. Separate studies have suggested that short-term wellness programs can often have dubious cost outcomes for payers and employers.

Humana’s study demonstrates that if employers focus aspects of health with high pay-off and are committed to longevity, wellness programs have the potential to transform the wellbeing of their workforce and cut costs.

By running the program for multiple years, the researcher weeded out early adopters. Humana also emphasized rewards for completing healthy tasks and provided resources such as online educational assessments. The data demonstrate correlations between engagement in the wellness program and health outcomes, healthcare spending, workplace productivity, and clinical risk.