Choosing the right (or wrong) wellness portal could impact your company’s health and wellness program significantly. The research is clear that implementing the right wellness program could save you money and ultimately improve profits for your company. So what should you look for when you’re choosing a wellness portal for your company? In this post, we’ll go over what you need to consider when you’re making a decision about a wellness portal for your company. Let’s delve right into it.
Privacy
HIPAA exists to protect the health information of individuals and your wellness portal should be compliant with HIPAA regulations. Does the wellness portal provide confidential health risk assessments for your employees? How is this information used? In this age of frequent data and privacy breaches, people are wary of sharing their most intimate information with software they’re unfamiliar with.
There are people who even have fears that their health status could be used as a discriminatory tool against them when it comes to their work status. In fact, according to this study, more than 80% of consumers are concerned with how their data is stored, shared and used.
Thus, it is important to investigate and confirm that the software you’re using will keep all health information secure and private. It is also important on your end as an employer to assure employees that their health status or self-reporting that they have a chronic condition will not get them terminated from work or discriminated against.
Customizable Health Risk Assessments
The foundation of a proper wellness program is the health risk assessment. It is important that health risk assessments (HRAs) are customized to individuals otherwise you and your employees will never see the results you want.
Individualized Goals
A good wellness portal should have individualized goals based on an employee’s health risk assessment. It makes no sense for an employee to fill out a detailed HRA and have nothing to follow up on, especially if there are problem areas.
Employees are more likely to follow through with health goals and advice when it is tailored to them.
Education
Apart from providing users with goals and suggestions to follow up on, a good wellness portal should have educational material for employees.
This could include videos on particular health conditions, demonstrations on how to perform certain exercises or easy-to-digest reading material on how to stay healthy. These educational tools can be combined with company-mandated or company-organized in-person educational sessions.
It is important to note that people are more likely to participate in your wellness education programs when there is an incentive to do so.
Track employee participation
Your wellness program should be able to track employee participation. Sometimes, employees get busy and might forget to fill out health risk assessments or log in to the wellness portal.
The wellness portal should be able to track this and send out reminders via email or text to employees to remind them of completing a health risk assessment.
Accessible via apps
Your wellness portal should be easily accessible on an app. According to a study in 2018 by Deloitte, smartphone users check their phones an average of 52 times per day. For millennials and younger generations, this number goes as high up as 150 times per day.
This is clearly an addiction and we’ve written about how to break a compulsive cell phone habit on this blog. However, this also presents an opportunity.
If people are checking their phones that many times per day, they could also access their wellness portals, receive notifications and educational material this way too.
All the components of your wellness program seamlessly integrate into your wellness portal
The best wellness portals should allow you to integrate all the components of your wellness program into one portal.
It would be frustrating and ultimately expensive to have your health risk assessments, online education, tracking and personalization, mobile optimization and incentives and rewards on different applications.
In fact, this can drastically decrease participation in wellness programs. So make sure your wellness portal has everything you need to create an all-in-one wellness program that is easily accessible.
Is the wellness portal customizable?
Because you want to ensure that the wellness portal meets your specific needs as a company. A good wellness portal should be able to allow you to add your brand/business, logo, put in specific statements like informed consent and privacy statements.
You could also be able to edit and adjust HRAs so that it suits your goals for a company-wide wellness program.
Customer service
Are you able to get quick and reliable customer service at the company issuing your wellness portal? This is important to consider because no matter how many tech-savvy people you have in your company, you will have more than one question at some point. It’s important that the company issuing your wellness portal software can solve problems for you.
Final thoughts
You wouldn’t be reading this article if finding the right wellness portal was not important to you. In this post, we’ve gone over the most crucial features to look out for when you’re out shopping for a wellness portal. We hope it helps you make the best decision for your company. If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with someone else.
