Wellness programs don’t work for you or your company, U.S. study shows

Workplace wellness programs have two main goals: improve employees’ health and lower their employers’ health-care costs. They’ re not very good at either, new research finds.

For the study, 3,300 employees of the University of Illinois at Urban a-Champaign were given a year of access to iThrive, a workplace wellness program similar to what many companies offer workers. A control group of 1,534 didn’t get access to it at all.

Those offered the program were randomly split into six groups. All were offered a biometric screening, a health assessment and various services and classes, such as chronic disease management, tai chi and a fitness challenge. But the six groups were paid different incentives for completing each step of the program — anywhere from US$50 to US$350.

The researchers wanted to answer three questions: Do wellness programs have any effects on health outcomes, medical spending and other measures including productivity? (The jury has been out on that.) Can money spur more people to participate? (Many programs have trouble with enrolment.) And finally, who’s most likely to participate? (If only healthy people do, the programs won’t achieve much.)

Their study found that wellness programs—event hose with incentive s—don’ t change employees’ behaviour much. The findings were published as a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Over the years, hundreds of studies have examined the efficacy of wellness programs with mixed results.

Much of that research has calculated savings by looking at the difference in health-care spending between staff who opt in to such programs and those who don’t. But the new study measured differences by randomly creating a control group with no access to the wellness program at all. With that method, it found that medical spending disparities pre-existed the wellness program.

“Our results are significantly different,” said Damon Jones, an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy who conducted the study along with two UIUC researchers. “They rule out the kind of effects you find in nearly 80 per cent of those prior studies.”

First, money isn’t much of an incentive. Without any cash offered, a little under half of employees completed the assessment and screening. A US$100 reward for completing the screening only boosted that rate to 59 per cent. Doubling that reward didn’t make much difference, raising the share of employees finishing the screening merely to 63 per cent.

Looking at health insurance claims throughout the year, the researchers found participation in the wellness program didn’t result in better health outcomes or lower health-care costs. The medical spending habits of the staff who didn’t have access to the program were “almost identical” to those of the workers who did, said Jones.

Those most likely to take advantage of their employer’s wellness offerings are healthy people who don’t spend a lot on health care, and staff with the highest healthcare costs are the least likely to participate.

Surveys the researchers offered enrollees also found that wellness had no impact on job satisfaction or productivity.