5 Ways to Evaluate Your Wellness Vendor

With the growing popularity of corporate health and wellness programs comes an increase in the variety of plan options available, as well as the number of vendors selling packaged plans to employers. Selecting the right vendor for your company is a challenge that can be met by evaluating these five standards.

Security
Data is now an invaluable commodity. The security of any system should comply with either HITRUST, SOC 2, PCI, ISO 27001 or other industry standard. If certification is not available, then evidence of policies, enforcements and third-party security scanning should be made available upon request. Personally identifiable information should only be sent through a secure channel. Sending Social Security numbers and other patient data through an unsecured channel allows unauthorized access that can lead to identity theft.

Quality of Data
All data collected should be accurate, complete, valid, truthful and without duplication. This criteria should be enforced at every phase of the wellness program implementation from initial member registration to operation to the generation of reports and billing. Vendors must use a reliable method to validate member registration in the health and wellness program by cross referencing it with a valid data source for eligibility. Vendors also need to be held accountable for data quality, as inaccurate information will invariably lead to faulty conclusions and expensive decisions.

Privacy
Transparency is essential to ensuring employee engagement. Employees should know who can see their private data, where the data is going and how it’s being used. Additionally, employees should be able to opt out of certain items such as extended third party personal data capture. It is also important to ensure that vendors are HIPAA compliant and can notify the affected parties if a violation occurs.

Program Effectiveness
Prior to hiring a vendor, employers should establish mutually agreed upon criteria to measure program effectiveness (i.e., participation rates, health outcomes and/or medical expenditures). Once these criteria are finalized, the methods to analyze the data should be formalized. Ideally, the analysis will be conducted by a neutral platform that generates objective data – rather than relying on vendors who have an interest in reporting positive results. This will hold vendors accountable to the performance metrics that are most valuable to your company.

Technology
Employers should understand the technology that supports their wellness program; the reliability of the technology is critical to measuring the effectiveness of  an organization's initiatives. This can be evaluated by looking at how the technology is implemented, past satisfaction reviews, system uptimes, scalability, security and quality.

Wellness Workdays adheres to these five critical factors and provides clients with the highest level of service. Contact us for more information about our award-winning programs.

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