Outcomes are Everything
As fitness centers take their appropriate place in the healthcare continuum, health data must be collected, measured, and aggregated to prove the efficacy of programs. Efficacy is the main driver to keep the referrals coming in, to maintain a place as a partner in healthcare, and to access members that wouldn’t walk into your club on their own. Positive outcomes are your proof that what you are doing works.
A Walk Through the Numbers
Let’s take a look at what this means. Say you are offering physician referred weight loss, blood pressure management, and general health programs at three locations. The programs have several measurements that are common to them all and a few that are unique to each. They all have some version of initial assessment, potentially a mid-way assessment, and then a final assessment at the end of the program period. They all have program goals that everyone enrolled in the program works toward. For the sake of this exploration, let’s say the assessments are asking for the same basics: height, weight, blood pressure systolic & diastolic, BMI, waist circumference, percent body fat, and resting heart rate.
If you average 50 referrals from physicians/month at each location and they elect to engage in the program, you will have 150 enrollments. Each enrollment will generate a minimum of 24 pieces of health data collected in addition to program goal data for things like weekly active minutes, daily steps and weekly club visits. That’s over 10,000 measurements for just one month!
If you’re keeping track of health data in Excel, you know that this is where the spreadsheet hits the wall. Individual locations want individual access. Sharing and network issues become a nightmare. And when you layer on the business outcomes dimension, keeping track of which referrals became enrollments and of those enrollments which ones rolled to become an annual membership, you are now well on your way to having a massive spreadsheet headache.
What About the Patients?
To take this a little farther out, patients are more connected to their health data than ever. Whether through wearable tracking technology or even by logging into their patient portals to review information from their latest doctor appointment, they are more interested in seeing the results of their efforts to improve their health. How are you showing them that your program is useful in helping them meet their health goals? And how do you report back to physicians that their patient enrolled in a fitness program and to what end? Please don’t say you are handing them back a piece of paper.
We’re Here to Help
Admittedly, Excel can get the job done, for a single program at a single location, but only to a point. There are several other things to consider like scalability, interoperability, HIPAA-compliance and data security, too. In MyWelld™ featuring EWR™ (Electronic Wellness Record) where activity logs become relevant health data, we bring everything together in one place. Physicians, workplace health, participants and fitness & wellness centers all work together to help their patients, employees and members achieve the outcomes that ultimately matter most; helping people live their best lives.