HealthONE improves employee wellness with incentaHEALTH

HealthONE’s 9,000-employee staff works long hours in a stressful, fast-paced environment to assure quality healthcare for their patients. Now, the Denver-based healthcare system is giving back to their dedicated team through a new wellness program with incentaHEALTH.

Denver-based incentaHEALTH is a healthcare technology company helping organizations reduce their healthcare costs by offering incentives to employees for improving and maintaining their health. The company provides interactive email coaching, workplace weigh-ins on private kiosks and cash rewards for sustained weight loss success.

In the first few weeks since the kickoff, over 3,000 HealthONE employees and their dependents are using the program to improve their health, particularly weight management.

“We try to change the way wellness is done,” said Todd McGuire, incentaHEALTH’s chief technology officer. He said that while previous workplace wellness efforts have been passive, short-term and only reward clients for participation rather than progress, incentaHEALTH is doing the opposite.

“We will administer everything from launching the program, doing the kickoff, enrolling the employees, sending on the coaching, answering the questions, sending out the incentives and giving you the reports,” said McGuire. The approach is done on a push basis rather than trying to pull in participants, who are then rewarded for the progress they make. Ideally, incentaHEALTH is a multiple-year program.

Eight HEALTHspot kiosks have been installed throughout the HealthONE system across the Denver metro area. The kiosks give employees instant access to automated biometric measurements of weight, blood pressure and BMI, instant feedback, 24-hour operation and full-body digital imaging. All kiosks are private and secure the electronic records for both employees and the employer.

incentaHEALTH works with participating businesses to create a unique program that will best help their employees make progress.

“We work with the clients to figure out their culture, and we have different visual styles that kind of fit the culture of the different company,” said McGuire. “We put that in place and it all culminates with our team coming on site to do 24 kickoff sessions.”

It is not mandatory for employees to participate in the program. McGuire said about 56 percent of all overweight employees sign up after the initial kickoff presentations, and that HealthONE is already off to a great start.

“I think with HealthONE we’re exceeding those numbers,” he said. “They’ve got a ton of top-level executive support.”