Wellness Program Dashboards
5 Rules for Success
I recently had the privilege of facilitating a roundtable discussion at the Summer 2018 HERO Think Tank on the topic of wellness dashboards. This was a great opportunity to share Scott’s knowledge and experience surrounding this valuable tool in health risk management. From my experience at the HERO Think Tank, and from our day-to-day engagement with clients, I developed the following five “rules” for wellness dashboarding.
1. Engage, Ask and Listen. In order to be successful, wellness dashboarding must involve real engagement at all levels of leadership. Engagement comes in the form of discussion, asking good questions and listening intently to everyone with a vested interest in the dashboard. While this is the most critical rule when it comes to wellness and risk management dashboarding, it is unfortunately also the rule many organizations are most likely to forgo. Why? Because it takes time. We have learned that you will either take the time on the front end or you will be forced to take the time later. In our experience, later is actually much harder.
2. Keep it Simple. While there is a myriad of metrics in wellness and health risk to measure, a strong dashboard will only include measures that have true value to the business and matter to the leadership involved.
3. Harness the Power of Storytelling. Good stories are powerful. They demand focus, compel excitement and have staying power in our memories. By going beyond the data to tell the story of an organization through a health and wellness dashboard, leaders become engaged, interested and about how they can lead their employees and the organization to experience better health and wellness performance.
4. Use Horizontal Data Integration. So much of our decision making with data dashboards is siloed. Wellness decisions are in one bucket, workers’ compensation in another and health plan benefits in yet another. As these data sources are integrated, they become more meaningful in a way that provides powerful metrics around the total risk in a population for continuous measurement and improvement.
5. Measure what Matters to Your Business. Not all organizations believe that clinical wellness data is important to their business. In fact, some organizations are more concerned with measuring their work environment and culture related to personal health and well-being than digging deep into their health plan data. There is no right or wrong, only what is valuable to the business.
I believe these simple rules can help any business be more successful and effective in their implementation and use of wellness dashboards. If you want to know more about dashboarding and how it can help your organization, please contact me or any of our Health Risk Consultants at Scott.
