Medforma unveils new Internet-based wellness platform

Aug 16 2010

Nearly 80 percent of health care costs are spent on treating preventable diseases. And most of this burden falls on employers and employees. To help employers reduce these expenses while improving the health of their workforces, St. Paul-based Medforma Inc., today unveiled the next-generation of its Internet-based wellness platform called Health Portrait™.

“With our latest advancements, employers will receive invaluable information to help them better manage health costs and wellness investments”

Health Portrait™ is far more than a traditional worksite wellness program. Using an interactive Web-based model, the program engages individuals in a systematic approach to change unhealthy behaviors that lead to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular, stroke, depression and some cancers. Health Portrait™ provides a customized experience for each individual, leveraging Medforma's exclusive license of scientific behavior-modification expertise of the Prevention Research Center at Stanford University's School of Medicine, the largest prevention research center in the country.

To date, more than 30,000 employees have used the Health Portrait™ program, resulting in an impressive 10-to-1 return on investment for employers.

Now, Medforma is enhancing those benefits through its new Group Portrait^TM Developer, an online tool that gives employers insight into the collective health of their employees. While individuals' data remains confidential, employers can access aggregate information about a variety of health and wellness factors among their workers, such as the prevalence of high blood pressure and even employees' readiness to adopt healthy lifestyle changes.

"With our latest advancements, employers will receive invaluable information to help them better manage health costs and wellness investments," said Kye Anderson, CEO of Medforma. "At less than $50 per employee per year, our platform is highly affordable, but the advantages are substantial, especially considering the high cost of keeping employees healthy and productive."

Recent research demonstrated Health Portrait's effectiveness in making employees healthier and saving employers' money. A four-year study of 19,000 participants showed their risk of disease declined in six key health risk categories.

"Our goal at Medforma is to provide tools that are so intuitive that people actually like to use them - so they can personally engage in health improvement they're ready for," Anderson said

By identifying the behaviors people are most ready and need to change, Health Portrait coaches users on their own health risks and provides individualized steps to help control, delay, or prevent disease and the associated health care costs. The program can also include specific modules tailored to focus on particular health issues associated with an employee group.

Health Portrait's ease of use, paired with Stanford's deep understanding of human behavior, results in employee participation rates far above the typical 30 percent achieved by traditional programs - ranging from 68 to 100 percent.

Thompson West Publishing is one of many companies who have invested in Health Portrait™.

"Medforma's aggregate data on our employees' health improvement allowed us to negotiate a 2 percent reduction in health insurance premiums," said Richard Dunn, who managed Thompson West's program as human resources vice president for compensation and benefits. "We implemented Medforma because it is science-based and not affiliated with any health plan or provider. We retained the program because it is easy to use, it makes employees feel more bonded to the company and it stabilized our skyrocketing insurance premiums."