When it comes to healthy behavior adherence one size does fit all.
Less is always more for busy adults.
Do as little as possible to have an impact. This is scalable, sustainable, and smart.
Use as little online interaction as possible - no one needs more eye candy or pages to click through. Do not try and be the center of anyone's cyberworld. Healthy behavior adherence happens in the real world.
Focus on developing creative ways to encourage all adults to adopt or maintain the often boring, mundane, and routine healthy behaviors of exercise, nutrition, sleep, and smart daily health decisions. Wellness programs don't need to be fancy, just faithful and friendly.
To maximize the human component of the behavior change process, engage as many adults as possible in the same health behavior at the same time through a simple, non-invasive, and friendly format.
Remove barriers to participation by designing wellness efforts so that if everyone participated all would receive some benefit.
Treat adults like adults not research subjects.
Analyze the success of program efforts through data that is already being collected outside wellness effort such as medical claims, absenteeism, and employee/member data.
Just because health data can be collected does not mean it should be. Respect the privacy of adults and limit collecting health risk status or protected health information from employees/members. Personal health assessments often waste time, energy, and money and do damage to wellness programming efforts over time when assessment is used as the gateway to program participation and engagement. Health assessments are best utilized when results are simply shared by participant with their primary care provider to maximize the value of a routine preventive exam. Leave people's health status and protected health information where it should be - between them and their doctor.
Stop health risk status labeling and efforts that are only designed to target labeled people. Adults do not appreciate being labeled and many will not participate. Remove barriers by removing health assessments and risk status labeling as the gateway to program participation.
When it comes to healthy behavior adherence one size does fit all - everyone needs to exercise, eat right, obtain adequate sleep, and make smart health decisions every day for the rest of their busy lives. IHW's approach simply encourages, tracks, and rewards healthy behavior adherence for life.
