Wellness Programs Are A Win-Win For Cost Saving, Member Outcomes

A digital therapeutic weight loss program led to major medical cost savings, according to a Rally Health Inc. study that points to wellness programs as cost-effective strategies to tackle the obesity epidemic.

The study published in Obesity examined program data over a three-year period to analyze medical cost trends for those participating in Rally Health’s Real Appeal weight loss intervention program.

Researchers compared medical costs for a group of participants in the digital therapeutic wellness program with costs for a control group of non-participants. The control group was selected to match the intervention group in terms of health risk, baseline medical costs, age, gender, geographic region, and chronic conditions.

The study found that the wellness programming resulted in significant weight loss. There was an average weight loss of 3 percent for 4,790 program participants who attended at least one session over a 52-week period.

In addition to providing positive member outcomes, the wellness program lowered medical expenditures significantly. Costs for the intervention cohort were 12 percent less than costs for the control group. What’s more, the savings of the wellness program cohort were 2.3 times more than program costs, marking significant return on investment.

“Improvements in health resulting from digital weight loss programs have been shown in other studies, but few have considered the financial impact on employers and payers that sponsor these programs,”, the study’s lead researcher Cecelia Horstman said in a press release.

“These results show that a digital weight loss intensive lifestyle intervention program is a smart investment not only in terms of a participant’s health, but also for the employers and health plans,” continued Horstman, who previously served as director of health outcomes at Rally Health.

An additional 3,990 participants who attended more than nine sessions over a year had an average weight loss of 4.4 percent. Total medical costs for this group were 14 percent less than the control cohort, and total savings equated to 2.0 times program costs.

This research points to a potential cost-effective strategy to dismantle the obesity epidemic.

“The obesity epidemic in America is real, it’s costly, and we know it has a detrimental impact on the workforce,” said one of the study’s research collaborators Donna Ryan, MD, professor emerita at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

“With this research from Real Appeal, we have a better understanding that digital weight loss intensive lifestyle intervention programs deliver net positive results both in terms of employee health and employer cost savings. We hope this contributes to the upward trend in their use,” Ryan noted.

The researchers noted that although the United States Preventive Services Taskforce (USPSTF) has recommended intensive lifestyle intervention for adults with obesity, so it is not surprising that this program led to weight loss.

High costs have proven a barrier to implement wellness programming, as over 40 percent of Americans would qualify based on BMI. However, this research shows that wellness programming can produce a two-fold return on investment.

The researchers noted that an analysis of obesity‐related health costs reported that the annual medical cost for obesity was $1,901 per individual in 2014 US dollars on average. This equates to $149.4 billion in spending every year on obesity.

“Application of an intervention such as this program on a larger, national scale could substantially reduce the contribution of obesity to health care costs and result in significant savings for the health care system,” the study authors wrote.

“For example, treatment of approximately 1 in 6 patients with obesity in the United States (16 million people) and getting 10 million to be active participants could, based on our trial results, result in savings of over $8 billion health care dollars over 3 years,” they projected.