Case Study: Complete Wellness Solutions Improves Wellness & Healthcare Costs with Human API

PARTNERSHIP POWERS “BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE” EMPLOYEE WELLNESS PROGRAMS

Summary

Faced with the challenge of tracking data from hundreds of wearables, activity trackers, and health apps, Complete Wellness Solutions (CWS) looked to Human API to help improve its corporate wellness programs. With its consumer-centric health data network, Human API enables CWS to provide “bring your own device” wellness programs and delivers where its competitor falls short, offering more data connections at a lower cost. With Human API, CWS has improved employee health and wellness and achieved healthcare savings for its employer clients on the order of thousands of dollars per employee per year.

Challenge

For any employer looking to reduce healthcare costs, empowering employees to participate in corporate wellness programs with their own devices can yield great results. Whether they use Fitbit, GoogleFit, Garmin, Map My Run, or any other device or app, employees are more likely to actively participate in a wellness program if it doesn’t require them to significantly change their behavior or the apps and devices they already use. However, tracking data from the hundreds of wearables, activity trackers, and health apps on the market today poses a significant challenge. Yet the alternative of having employees report their own data prevents employers from capturing the verified data they need to drive meaningful change. What’s more, new wellness apps and devices are created nearly every day. Keeping up with the pace of change is problematic. This proved true for CWS whose previous integration partner was unable to connect to apps like MyFitnessPal, arguably one of the most popular wellness apps available today. In addition, gathering Apple Watch data was an expensive add-on.

The former integration partner also did little to normalize the data to make it more manageable and accessible to CWS and its corporate clients. For example, with apps like Map My Run, CWS would need to manually sort through the raw data to get what they needed.

Ultimately, with high costs and subpar functionality, CWS decided that the partnership was no longer working and found it an easy decision to switch to Human API. “Not only was their base cost higher, but they didn’t cover as many devices,” said Chuck Zumbrun, CIO of Complete Wellness Solutions. “When our contract came up at the end of the year, we made the switch.”

Solution

A convergence of factors has driven the need for the wellness services and integrations enabled by CWS and Human API. First, the health of the average American is on the decline. Diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity are at epidemic levels. Second, the cost of healthcare is higher than ever before, rising to more than $10,000 per person in 2017 versus just $146 per person in 1960.1 And finally, the growing popularity of activity trackers and wellness apps gives employers an opportunity to influence their employees’ wellness and potentially reduce healthcare costs.

With Human API embedded into the CWS corporate wellness portal, employees can connect their own wearable devices and apps including Fitbit, Apple, Garmin, Strava, GoogleFit, MyFitnessPal, and many others. By engaging employees in the sharing of wellness data, Human API enables CWS clients to improve the health and wellness of their employees while also reducing healthcare costs.

“Human API enables us to offer a frictionless, ‘bring your own device’ approach to employee wellness,” said Zumbrun. “Instead of building and maintaining integrations with multiple activity trackers, we can now access hundreds of devices through a single relationship.”

Previously, CWS was limited in the data it could gather. The focus was on activity, tracking steps, calories burned, and distances. Today with Human API, CWS gathers this data and additional metrics like nutrition data, food diaries, sleep patterns, weight, and even heart rate and blood pressure information. The company trusts that all data is accurate and verified, an important consideration for providing the value its corporate clients expect.

“Capturing verified data is a real competitive advantage for us,” said Zumbrun. “We can show clients and potential clients the return on investment they’ll achieve by working with us to develop a wellness program.” In addition, CWS found the transition to Human API to be easy and painless. “We embedded Human API into our wellness platform in a matter of days and started collecting real-time data immediately,” said Zumbrun.