To Hack Health Care Costs, Employers Can Now Track How Grocery Shop

Photo: Martin LaBar (going on hiatus) via photopin

 

It’s no million-dollar bonus, but your HR department could soon be offering you a new perk to help you stay healthy — and help your company save money on health care.

A just-launched online service called NutriSavings will give workers coupons and cash back to encourage the purchase of more nutritious foods. In exchange, you’ll have to lift the curtain a little on what you buy at the grocery store.

The benefit program is a joint venture between employee benefits multinational Edenred and digital coupons startup SavingStar. It arrives as many companies are seeking to curb their health care expenses through so-called wellness programs.

Some companies are seeking a more intimate connection with their workers’ habits in an effort to socially engineer better behavior. Drugstore giant CVS is reportedly demanding employees enrolled in its health insurance plan undergo a wellness screening and disclose various personal data, including weight and body fat percentage. Those who don’t will face a $50 per month penalty.

NutriSavings, by contrast, requires the same level of disclosure required of anyone who uses a grocery store loyalty card to get discounts when they shop. The NutriSavings system tracks what you buy and scores your food purchases according to nutritional quality. If you score low, NutriSavings offers you discounts on healthier alternatives. If you score high, you get coupons to keep you going back for more of the same.

To be clear, NutriSavings does not let employers monitor specific purchases made by individual employees.

“Your boss will never know what you’re eating,” says NutriSavings CEO Gerard Bridi, who says NutriSavings is an opt-in program.

But employers do get to see aggregate data on how healthily their workers are shopping. At NutriSavings, for example, Bridi says employees can get up to $30 cash back per month through the program on the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables. If despite that perk, the collective nutrition score of employee grocery choices still comes in low on a scale of 1 to 100, the company can tweak the benefit to encourage them to put more produce in their carts.

According to Bridi, the economic incentive for companies and insurers to get more involved in their workers’ eating habits is plain. Most health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, many of which are preventable through better lifestyle and diet choices.

To ensure employees hear that message over and over again, the NutriSavings system is designed to ensure those workers have to return to the site regularly, where they’re showered with articles on better eating. Their accounts also list everything they’ve bought at the store; anything that rates lower than a 50 on the nutrition scale comes with a clickable suggestion for a healthier alternative, and often a coupon for that better option. Employees are forced to come back to the site because their coupons aren’t redeemable at the register. Instead, they pay full price at the store, then redeem their discounts afterward on the site in many forms, ranging from money in the bank to farmer’s market vouchers to dollars shaved off their health insurance premium payments.

“There aren’t many wellness programs around nutrition that are measurable or trackable. Most are ‘read this book’ or ‘attend this seminar’ and you’re good to go,” Bridi says. “We wanted something based on continuous education.”

NutriSavings isn’t identifying the specific companies or health insurers signed up for the program but says those that have will likely start offering the option to workers around June. It will be interesting to see whether employees will welcome this kind of lifehacking from their bosses, or whether they’ll see the coupons as an excessive intrusion into their personal lives. On the one hand, who doesn’t want to pay less to eat better? On the other hand, could a company-issued FitBit be far behind?

 

Original Article: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/hacking-worker-health-with-coupons/ By:  Marcus Wohlsen