Top 16 Features of a Successful Wellness Platform

Are you looking for a corporate wellness platform?

Maybe you’re a wellness manager or human resources director tasked with choosing a corporate wellness platform for your company.

You start looking around at all your options, and you get that deer-in-the-headlights look. But, You’re you’re left wondering which corporate wellness platform will work best for your organization. Sound familiar?

You start looking around at all your options, and you get that deer-in-the-headlights look. You’re left wondering which corporate wellness platform will work best for your organization. Sound familiar?

Are you feeling frustrated about choosing a wellness platform? Uncertain? Not sure which one is right for your organization? You’re not alone.

What is a wellness platform?

A wellness platform is a web-based technology that can host a variety of programs used to evaluate, engage, inform, motivate, and incentivize employees based on your wellness strategy. The platform should be API-compatible with the ability to integrate with third-party vendors.

What’s the difference between a wellness platform and a wellness portal?

A wellness platform gives you the ability to add programs beyond the vendor-established program offering or cookie-cutter design of a wellness portal. An effective corporate wellness platform features a flexible design that allows you configure it to meet the needs of your organization, population, and wellness and benefits strategy.

Develop your strategy with a corporate wellness platform

A wellness platform is not a strategy. With the right features, it’s a tool you can use to develop and implement your strategy to promote health, prevent disease, increase engagement, boost productivity, and ultimately control healthcare costs.

With the right approach, intrinsic motivation will lead people who are already health conscious to engage, participate, and set an example for others. And with a little nudge of extrinsic motivation from your wellness strategy, you can boost participation and have a greater impact on population health.

What wellness features matter most? Start with this. You need to protect your data. Data security should be your highest priority. Your wellness platform must protect personal health information. And it must comply with all state and federal privacy laws. It’s critical to security. And it’s critical to boost engagement.

Still not sure which platform is right for you? Don’t throw in the towel just yet. And don’t just roll the dice and pick one. Make sure the platform you choose includes these 16 features:

1. Highly flexible

No two wellness programs are the same. Every workforce population is different. And health risk factors for one population won’t be the same from one organization to the next. A one-size-fits-all corporate wellness platform doesn’t make sense. Going with a fixed-design platform will only lead to more frustration.

• Your corporate wellness platform needs to be flexible,
• It needs to be customizable
• And it needs to be easily configurable to fit your wellness strategy

Your wellness strategy might focus on well-being, use a hybrid model, be outcome-based, or even use a combination of different strategies. Your wellness platform needs to support your strategy and be adaptable. Otherwise, you’re almost guaranteed to waste time and money trying to achieve your wellness program goals.

Is your corporate wellness platform highly flexible?

2. Health risk assessment

If you want to identify population health risk factors that cost your organization the most in healthcare dollars, use a health risk assessment. It’s an evidence-based questionnaire designed to help you collect information about diet, lifestyle, and health risks from individuals to get a picture of population health.

HRA data for your population will help you shape your wellness strategy. And individual participants can use their personal HRA data to work with a health coach or their doctor to get healthy and stay healthy.

Does your corporate wellness platform include a health risk assessment?

3. Health literacy

Did you know only 12 percent of adults in the U.S. have a basic understanding of health literacy? That’s a problem. Ever checked to find out if the health information you share with your population is easy to understand? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Medicaid, and many health insurance companies require patient-facing health content be written at or below a 7^th grade reading level.

Does your corporate wellness platform meet health literacy standards?

4. Quiz builder

What if you wanted real-time data from your population? You want to find out how they’re doing. What’s their diet, exercise, exercise, sleep, mental health like? How would you get that info? Create a short quiz, and ask. If your corporate wellness platform includes a quiz builder, it’s easy:

• Pick a topic.
• Write your quiz questions and answers.
• Assign correct answers a point value.
• You can even offer an incentive for completing the quiz. It’s a fast and easy way to boost engagement and get information you can use to drive wellness programming.

Can you create a quiz with your corporate wellness platform?

5. Wellness event calendar

You plan a wellness event and want your population to participate. How do you let them know about it? You could piece together a communication plan via email, an online calendar, and digital reminders. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. If your corporate wellness platform includes a wellness event calendar, you can easily:

• Schedule biometric screenings
• Schedule fitness classes
• Invite participants to a cooking demonstration
• Host a financial wellness classes
• Track sign-ups.
• Set automatic reminders.
• And make your life easier as a wellness program manager

Does your corporate wellness platform have an event calendar/planner?

6. Biometric screening

It’s a critical component of an effective wellness program. Results from a basic blood draw can provide insight about health risks. Biometric screening data can tell you if your population is at risk for things like:

• Heart disease
• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Certain types of cancer, and more.

It takes time to coordinate a biometric screening and get results. But it doesn’t have to. Choose a corporate wellness platform already connected to a network of medical providers for on-site and off-site biometric screenings.

Does your corporate wellness platform offer biometric screenings?

7. Corporate wellness challenges

Need a fun and easy way to engage your population? Host a health challenge. If that sounds like a lot of work, don’t worry. The best corporate wellness platforms include done-for-you wellness challenges that are easy to launch and manage like:

• Eat more fruits and vegetables
• Get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night
• Exercise 30 minutes a day
• Keep a food diary
• Lose weight or maintain a healthy weight

Your health challenge shouldn’t just provide a way to log activity. Done right, it can have a much bigger impact. With a properly-designed health challenge, you can motivate people to change behaviors, create a culture of health, engage participants, and get results. How do you do it? Provide action steps to be successful with incentive points to boost participation, and a way to track activity to increase accountability.

Does your corporate wellness platform offer corporate wellness challenges?

8. Health education content library

Want to support your published health education content? Provide digital health education content in the form videos your participants can watch, or audio files they can listen to. Some people learn better this way. It’s also a way to reinforce what someone already knows.Award them at the same time. You can use it beyond wellness like safety or on-boarding and many other purposes.

Does your corporate wellness program have a video/audio library of health education content?

9. Targeted communication

If you really want your wellness program to make a difference in population health and improve the lives of your employees, create targeted communications. Here are some ways you can do this:

• Invite participants with three or more risk factors for chronic disease to meet with a health coach.
• Create an event to help participants with high blood pressure learn lifestyle, exercise, and diet strategies to lower it.
• Host an exercise class or group walk for people who aren’t getting enough exercise.

Is there confusion among employees at different locations about your wellness program? Targeted communications can prevent that, too.

Can you send targeted communications with your corporate wellness platform?

10. Wellness rewards

What’s one of the best ways to boost wellness program participation? Reward effort and participation. Here’s how. Reward the effort with redeemable wellness points (for products or services) as an incentive. You could try and piece together your own program, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. An effective corporate wellness platform should include a plug-and-play system for wellness rewards.

Does your corporate wellness platform make it easy to offer wellness rewards?

11. Wearable technology integration

Everybody knows self-reported data is a flawed way of tracking physical activity. But if you want to encourage your participants to be more active, how do you track it? Use wearable technology to collect participant data from:

• Fitness watches
• Digital tracking devices
• Mobile apps

It’s easy if your corporate wellness platform is able to integrate with popular apps and devices. The major players include Google, Apple, FitBit, Garmin, and Samsung. If your wellness platform use a third-party aggregator, ask yourself these questions:

• Where is the data goes?
• Where is the data stored?
• Who owns the data?
• Is the third-party selling your participant data?
• What are they using your data for?
• Is it covered under the BAA?
• If the third-party experiences a security preach, is your participant data at risk?

Real-time data from digital devices and apps can be a great way to engage participants and get accurate data. But you need to make sure your wellness platform provider protects this data.

Everybody knows self-reported data is a flawed way of tracking physical activity. But if you want to encourage your participants to be more active, how do you track it? Use wearable technology like fitness watches, tracking devices, and mobile apps to collect participant data. It’s easy if your corporate wellness platform is able to integrate with popular apps and devices. If your wellness platform use a Third party aggregator then where is the data goes, who owns it, are they selling it? What are they using it for? Is is covered under the BAA?

Is your corporate wellness platform wearable-technology compatible?

12. Healthy recipes

What’s wrong with the typical American diet?

• Too many calories
• Unhealthy fats
• Added sugars
• Refined grains
• Too much sodium
• And not enough fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, lean meats, legumes, nuts, and seeds.

How can you help your population make better food choices? Share easy-to-make healthy recipes with information like serving size, calories per serving, and macronutrient information for proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

Does your corporate wellness platform have a library of healthy recipes?

13. Incentive management

How do you motivate participants to complete a wellness task? This can include things like a:

• Health risk assessment
• Biometric screening
• Fitness challenge
• Healthier eating
• Wellness events

The solution to boost participation: An effective corporate wellness program should be designed to make it easy to assign point values for wellness activities. When a participant earns points, give them a way to redeem points for gift cards or online purchases for products and services they need, want, and use.

A highly-configurable platform provides you with the flexibility you need to set the parameters that fit your company and not be forced to use the criteria of other companies.

Does your corporate wellness program include incentive management?

14. Health coaching

Want to help your participants and your population get healthy and adopt lifestyle habits to stay healthy? Offer health coaching. Your corporate wellness platform should make it easy for a health coaching to:

• Look at participant data
• Identify readiness to change
• Evaluate health risks
• Make recommendations to improve health
• Track progress. Member should also have access to their own coaching data.

Does your corporate wellness platform include health coaching features?

15. Claim integration

What are the primary health-related costs for your organization? If your corporate wellness platform is designed to support claim integration, it’s easy to compare health risk assessment and biometric screening results with health claims. It’s a data-driven way to:

• Make decisions to shape your wellness strategy
• Develop interventions to have the biggest impact on controlling healthcare costs
• Measure your return on investment in wellness, and more.

Does your corporate wellness platform support claim integration?

16. Analytics and reporting

• What are the primary health risk factors for your population?
• Did you see an improvement in population health from year to year?
• What lifestyle habits impact your population the most?
• Are your efforts to boost wellness program participation working?

If you want answers to these questions and more, your corporate wellness platform must give you the ability to analyze your data and generate reports to better understand your population. And it should be easy to do.

Does your corporate wellness platform include easy-to-use tools to analyze population health data and create reports?

16 Must-Have Features for Wellness Program Success

If you’re looking for a corporate wellness program with ultimate flexibility and customization, these 16 must-have features will make wellness program administration easier, support your wellness strategy, help you boost engagement and improve population health, and make your job easier.

The FitLyfe difference

Looking for a customizable wellness platform for your population to drive engagement, simplify program management, and get results?