You’ve probably heard the staggering numbers around diabetes. In the U.S. there are almost 30 million people with diabetes and 89 million with prediabetes. As many as one in three by 2030 will have diabetes.
People with diagnosed diabetes, on average, have medical expenditures approximately 2.3 times higher than what expenditures would be in the absence of diabetes.
It’s a bit of a problem in the U.S. but how can an employer address the disease?
Today I talk to Dr. David Marrero, who’s an expert in the field of clinical trials in diabetes and translation research. His career in diabetes research got started when he was diagnosed with diabetes 40 years ago and couldn’t find any research on the subject.
David and I discuss: the risk factors for diabetes, the Diabetes Prevention Program, treating the whole patient and what employers need to understand about their employees with diabetes.
As always, thanks for listening!
Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Redesigning Wellness podcast! If you’re a regular listener, you know myself and past guests have mentioned the Wellness Underground. This organization was created by Brian Passon and Evin Cole (along with 2 other members who are still underground). They also started an “unwellness” workshop in 2015
Today, I talk to Evin and Brian about the 2017 workshop. I also go into a speed round that asks them questions from the organizers perspectives.
I went to the workshop this past January and found it to be a refreshing approach to the standard conference. In particular, I liked the small atmosphere, speakers and time and ability to connect with almost all workshop participants.
For more info on the 2017 Wellness Underground workshop, you can visit http://www.wellnessunderground.com/.
Although this podcast interview is about Marketing and in particular, Word of Mouth Marketing, Geno Church opens up about a recent diagnosis with Type 2 Diabetes. He talks about the judgement and stigma that comes along with diabetes and how the food, celebrations and travel at work affect him.
Geno Church is the Word of Mouth Inspiration Officer at Brains on Fire. Brains on Fire is a tribe of passionate humans and creative rebels who get out of bed each day on a mission: to help their clients become stories people want to be a part of.
Around the 13-minute mark, Geno talks about Word of Mouth Marketing and how it starts with people not tactics or campaigns. In essence, whoever tells their story best wins.
Geno talks about the importance of employers paying attention to their employees being brand ambassadors and how to empower them to have a conversation on your behalf.
He tells us the signs you are starting to create a word of mouth wellness movement and leaves us with his advice on how to get employees involved in their health.
Love them or hate them, wellness vendors are common in the employer market. There are a ton of wellness vendors out there and chances are your employer is currently using one or has used one in the past. Often wellness vendors are seen as filling a needed gap but how do you wade through all of your options?
There are so many of them it’s hard to keep track and understand the key value propositions of each company. The standard process for employers selecting a wellness vendor is a very painful process, where there’s a long set of questions the vendor completes and an employer or consultant tries to compare each one and make a recommendation. If you’ve ever done this it’s a truly painful process that today’s guest set out to solve.
In this episode, I talk to Joe Miller. Joe ran a wellness company from 2003 to 2013 and felt that as a vendor that the RFP process didn't tell the whole story of what his company did. Also, he realized the process brokers/consultants were using to keep up with wellness vendors was inefficient. Joe left that company to start the Wellness Institute.
Joe describes his company as the Match.com or eHarmony of vendors, using a matching survey with 20 questions including goals, message, philosophies, and demographics.
In this episode, Joe and I talk about:
There's so much to know about the many different laws and regulations surrounding worksite wellness programs. To help us work through the many nuances of the laws, I brought on Attorney Barbara Zabawa, owner of the Center for Health & Wellness Law, LLC.
You almost have to sit down with a pen and paper for this podcast because there's a lot of caveats and scenarios that you'll need to consider, especially if you are collecting health information (think Health Assessment and biometrics), offering an outcomes based program or offering incentives.
I start off asking some pretty basic questions to set the groundwork for the conversation. Barbara starts off explaining that the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is the federal agency that enforces the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
Barbara then breaks down the EEOC's final wellness rules in May 2016, what an employer should consider when collecting health info, the first question employers should ask when designing a wellness program and the tobacco penalty limit.