Allina and Life Time Fitness partner in wellness program | ABC ...

Mercy Hospital President Tom O?Connor has his height checked in a myHealthCheck mobile unit, a service now available to Allina employees through a new partnership between Allina Hospitals & Clinics and Life Time Fitness. MyHealthCheck gives employees a health score through testing their LDL/HDL ratio, glucose, triglycerides, body composition, tobacco use and blood pressure. Photo by Bethany Kemming

by Bethany Kemming
Staff Intern

Allina Hospitals & Clinics and Life Time Fitness are partnering together to provide a health score for all Allina employees through Life Time?s myHealthCheck division. The score may determine the amount of a financial incentive the employee receives or the amount of their health insurance premium.

Life Time Fitness, Inc. Chairman, President, Chief Executive Office and Founder Bahram Akradi and Allina Hospitals & Clinics Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer Ken Paulus announced the partnership at a press conference at Mercy Hospital June 30.

Akradi said the program could greatly lower health care costs for employers and employees and compared the health score with a credit score.

?Creating this health score is a dramatic movement? this is no different than life insurance or your car insurance or your ability to get different rates for your percentage on financing based on your credit score, but it?s new to health care,? Akradi said.

MyHealthCheck is not mandatory for employees, but those that participate will receive either a financial incentive or a deduction in their health insurance premium based on their health score. Health scores range from four to 100 with 100 being the best possible score.

Akradi said the second year of the program is usually a little more rigid, requiring employees that don?t participate to pay the highest premium.

Along with incentives, myHealthCheck will offer online diagnostic dashboards of nearly 20 different health items.

Akradi said six of the 20 items have been approved by the legal and medical community to establish the health score: LDL/HDL ratio, glucose, triglycerides, body composition, tobacco use (nicotine) and blood pressure.

One dashboard will map their current health status and the other will map out the next six to 12 months of what the user can improve and the score they can attain. Wellness coaching is also available to help employees improve their health scores. Health professionals can use Skype or e-mail to communicate with employees about how they can make improvements.

Although Allina was Life Time?s first customer for this program, Life Time now has more companies interested. While Life Time Fitness will consult every company that uses myHealthCheck, Akradi said each individual company will author their own incentive or health program.

Life Time utilizes myHealthCheck mobile units that allow it to go to a business and offer health score testing for employees. Life Time can also set up a testing line inside a company to administer testing to employees, or employees can visit a Life Time Fitness location.

Health score testing is available at all Life Time Fitness facilities and Allina will be assigning medical doctors and medical representation to each Life Time facility.

The timing of this partnership is related to the future of health care, according to Paulus.

?The prior system was a system of fee for service? the future system will be one in which we?re paid to keep a group of people healthy. What better way to do that but to think about health and fitness and to bring that together with the health industry in a way that?s much more proactive,? Paulus said.

Allina and Life Time have been working on this effort for over a year. Allina expects to pay between $3 million to $4 million per year for the service, an amount Paulus said Allina was already investing in its own wellness program.

?It?s really an internal investment,? he said. In the grand scheme of things, we?re a three and a half billion dollar company, fairly small? what we?re getting in our own testing and our own traditional approach really doesn?t drive any behavior change.?

?Bahram?s organization is an expert at facilitating behavior change to improve fitness and health. We?ve never really thought about that in health care. We?re very responsive to health care crisis.?

Bethany Kemming is at bethany.kemming@ecm-inc.com

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Source: http://abcnewspapers.com/2011/07/09/allina-and-life-time-fitness-partner-in-wellness-program/

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