Four Steps to Success:
Assess, Identify, Engage, Report
The PhIT Platform uses a logical progression of steps to facilitate behavior changes:
- Assess: Accurate risk profiles that enable Active Health Monitoring requires up to date information, so to start employee health data is input into the PhIT Platform from any of the following: preexisting information, biometric data, specialized assessments or our PhIT20 assessment.
- Identify: The Risk Engine uses the employee health data to build an aggregate corporate risk profile and identifies the types of programs that are known to be effective in mitigating that risk.
- Engage: Wellness programs only work when people use them, so we have added special features to make it fun and satisfying for users to participate. To that end, we provide a personalized health and nutrition portal for each individual. On the corporate side, the PhIT Platform helps you design incentive programs to which employees respond.
- Report: In addition to real time tracking, the PhIT Platform provides summary reports on health, risk profiles and program efficacy, including the quantitative return on investment provided by your PhenotypeIT-optimized wellness programs.
More detail is available below or in our white paper - or go to How PhIT Works to see examples of how the PhIT Platform can work for your company.
Step 1: Assess Risk Accurately
The PhenotypeIT Platform transforms simple demographic and biometric data into accurate and clinically relevant ten-year risk prediction data for clients, insurers and health plans, using proven algorithms and our sophisticated Risk Engine. This decade-long context is important for near-term ROI because decisions that people make today impact their health over both the short and the long term.
The Risk Engine uses the assessments to determine the individual's risk of developing one or more of the major high cost chronic illnesses: Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome, Heart Disease, and Osteoporosis. It also uses the assessments to identify the modifiable unhealthy behaviors in which at-risk individuals may be engaging.
Our Risk Engine generates two types of risk profiles, one for individuals and the other for employers or payers. The individual risk profile is provided to the user via a password-protected portal. For employers and payers, risk is displayed on a corporate level, i.e., all the employees' profiles are de-identified and then aggregated to provide an overall corporate profile. Both types of profiles take full advantage of the next three steps in the PhenotypeIT process: Identify, Engage, and Report.
Timely baseline data is essential for establishing accurate risk profiles. Baseline data can be extracted from preexisting information, biometric data, specialized assessments, or any combination of sources. We provide several tools to help with this data collection process, as needed:
- The PhIT 20 Assessment, which uses 20 questions to determine an individual's risk factors and modifiable behaviors;
- Specialized Assessments for more in-depth data collection on Emotional Wellness, Lifestyle, Nutrition and other critical areas;
- Biometric Assessments for more accurate evaluations of health risks;
- Preexisting Information from medical records, previous Health Risk Assessments or health fair data.
Step 2. Identify Cost-Effective Solutions
Once the customized ten-year risk profiles have been generated and combined with information on the modifiable behaviors of individuals, we are ready for the next step: identification of wellness and incentive programs that are known to be effective in reducing risk. The PhIT Platform recommends specific, customized programs and information - we take the guesswork out of developing effective wellness programs.
For your employees, each has access to a private, customized portal complete with a dashboard that highlights their most serious health risks. To support change, the portal provides up-to-date information on managing risk and descriptions of health and nutrition programs that are effective for their specific needs. Since most health risks can be reduced with improved nutrition, we include a personalized nutrition plan for each employee that provides information, menu planning and tracking tools to help your employees' improve their health or simply maintain their already healthy behaviors.
On the corporate level, no individual data is available (to ensure HIPAA compliance and ease employees' privacy concerns). However, the combination of all your employees' risk data enables you to identify the low-hanging fruit for wellness programs quickly and easily. With the PhIT Platform, there is no need to guess as to whether an exercise or nutrition program will be more helpful in reducing risk
Of course, identifying the best programs is just one factor in reducing your company's healthcare costs; now you need to ensure that people take advantage of them. The fear of eventually developing a serious chronic illness may not be enough motivation for people to change their behavior. In that case, adding an incentive program that rewards employees for reaching corporate goals for weight loss or blood pressure reductions can be highly effective in motivating their compliance.
Step 3. Engage Your Employees in Wellness
Change is hard, whether you are trying to lose weight, stop smoking or even to take the stairs when you're used to taking the elevator. Change adds stress to life and there are few people who want to feel more stressed than they already do. Healthier behaviors often take more time, even if the resulting increase in energy and lifetime more than compensate eventually. Any wellness program faces an uphill battle in obtaining enough compliance to ensure overall improved health.
At PhenotypeIT, we understand this problem. We have designed engagement into every aspect of our platform and its tools, starting with personalized health and nutrition portals for individuals through corporate portals for easy wellness program management to incentive programs that succeed.
For employees, their personal portals provide all the information they want and need in an easily accessible format. Some of our innovative features are listed here; for more, please contact us for a demonstration.
- Dashboard: An easy-to-use interface shows their current risk levels for developing one of the big four chronic diseases. Their Health Report Card reveals what behaviors they need to change to reduce that risk.
- Menu Planner: One barrier to better eating is the time and energy it takes to plan, shop for and cook a meal. Our menu planner takes the tedium out of these steps by helping you create custom, tasty meals that improve your health.
- Health Trackers: Overall risk is determined by a combination of several types of biometric data, such as blood pressure, weight and others. Our Health Tracker allows you to select and track the factors that you care about.
- Incentive Programs: There's nothing like a little competition to help people stay motivated. Progress toward meeting goals in corporate incentive programs is kept up to date on your portal.
For employers, the corporate PhIT Portal keeps your HR people engaged in managing the wellness programs by providing continuously updated information on reduced risks, compliance and other progress.
Step 4: Report Progress and Document Success
"You can't change what you don't measure." - Peter Drucker
In addition to tracking progress, the PhIT Platform continuously and automatically generates reports that enable you to optimize your wellness programs. You can see at a glance which nutrition programs enjoy the highest compliance and which incentive programs are the most popular among your employees. You can spend less money trying different programs that may or may not work and focus more of your budget on programs with proven success.
When it comes time for your annual report or Board of Directors meeting, for the first time you will be able to show a quantified return on investment for your healthcare dollars. Studies have shown that wellness programs can return a few dollars on every healthcare dollar invested. With the PhIT Platform, you can maximize that return.
Making Change Work
Our risk profiles provide the motivation for at-risk individuals to change their behaviors and for companies to offer effective wellness programs. To stay motivated is always the challenge in making change, and this is where the PhenotypeIT tools and expertise come in. Our approach of Active Health Monitoring, which includs targeted outreach, customized health trackers and tools, enhance user engagement and drive positive behavior change. As people see their risk profiles improve in real time, they are motivated to continue new behaviors.
On the corporate level, the wellness programs administrator has the ability to select and incentivize programs that make a measurable difference in healthcare spending. For example, they can set up a campaign where employees receive incentives for improving their health such as a company-wide weight loss program (based on our Nutrition Program) where the company's average BMI must be reduced by 2 points within 6 months. In parallel, the employees take advantage of our user-friendly tools that promote engagement by helping them set goals, become educated and track their progress. In this case, the employees would be encouraged to set weight goals with our tools, then use our meal planning and food diary tools to work toward their goals. The company can encourage the use of the tools with incentive points awarded for achieving incremental goals or by providing support and weigh-ins at health fairs.
Focus on Nutrition
While exercise and other wellness programs can be helpful in addressing the Big Four chronic diseases, none has a greater impact than nutrition and none can be implemented more easily by at-risk individuals once they have easy access to the proper, customized education and planning tools. For these reasons, PhenotypeIT has developed a unique set of tools and capabilities that tie an individual’s risk factors to their diet and nutrition profile. These tools clearly show the link between nutrition and elevated risk factors. This allows the user to see a reduction in their risk factors as they improve and track their diet and nutrition. Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight becomes a means to better overall health, not just a weight goal to be attained. These tools allow a user to follow a nutrition plan that is completely customized to their unique dietary, health and metabolic needs.
Tools include:
- Complete nutritional assessment
- Personalized nutrition score card
- Weight goal and tracker
- Personalized meal planner
- Food diary
Information from PhIT Nutrition is continuously fed back to the PhIT Risk Engine updating the individuals risk profile and providing feedback on progress and elevating outreach if necessary. For more information, please see the PhIT Nutrition section.
Leverage Existing Systems & Programs
Our tools and programs are designed to be fully modular such that integration with other services is fast and easy while ensuring privacy. The integration is independent of any individual's profile, so that if employees leave or switch insurance providers, their profiles go with them and can be accessed through our direct to consumer site for a nominal annual fee. Examples of integration include:
- incentive programs so that the organization can incentivize employees based on outcomes (such as a weight goal) in addition to incentivizing based on action (such as completing a health assessment);
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) programs that increase outreach and enhance compliance and engagement; and
- traditional Care Management programs that might otherwise fail without the support and engagement tools provided by PhenotypeIT.
For more examples, please see PhIT for Employers and PhIT for Employees.
PhenotypeIT - The Smart Choice
The PhenotypeIT Platform is a sophisticated suite of technology and tools that enables you to leverage existing programs to make real, long-lasting changes in employee behavior that will reduce your costs while enhancing their health. No other product on the market has combined the latest scientific methodologies with user-friendly tools and integrated web services at our price points. Let us show you how the PhIT Platform can work for you; contact us for a demonstration.