Quizzify now offers a Health Risk Assessment (HRA) that addresses a much wider range of health risks than current HRAs, and by doing so, re-energizes an increasingly irrelevant self-assessment process (while guaranteeing compliance with any 2019 EEOC rule changes). See below for a legal commentary on Quizzify's HRA.
Why is an Alternative HRA Necessary?
According to Quizzify CEO, Al Lewis:
“We are in an era of new risks, and new risks require new risk assessments. It’s very likely your 2017 employee health risk assessment looks much like your 1997 employee health risk assessment, except with reversed dietary advice on carbohydrates. But good health is about much more than that.”
The possibility of carbohydrates causing diabetes years from now, while real, pales in comparison to the major risks employees face this year: opioid abuse, tick-borne illness, and overdiagnosis/overtreatment of the “worried well,” to name just three. Traditional HRA advice (that the road to good health is paved with kale, steps, and seat belts) has become obsolete in light of these and other major risks. This traditional advice ignores the realities that:
The leading cause of death in employees under 50 is opioid overdose, not heart attacks or diabetes.
In many states, younger employees face a far greater but more preventable risk of tick-borne illness than heart attacks.
America performs twice as many CT scans, MRIs, stents and spinal fusions as the average developed country…but has worse outcomes at much higher cost.
How Does Quizzify Change the Game?
Quizzify considers other risks not addressed by conventional HRAs. For instance, it is recommended universally that older employees who previously had chickenpox get a shingles vaccine. Quizzify’s curriculum includes this advice, most HRAs do not.
Does your HRA advise employees to wear seat belts? “If you’re routinely hiring employees who don’t realize these things are supposed to be buckled, I’d say HRAs are not your biggest problem,” observes Lewis. Quizzify’s curriculum includes education on the dangers of texting while driving, a far more prevalent practice whose risks are far less appreciated. Other more prevalent employee health issues are also addressed. “Contrary to the current cliché in the wellness business, sitting is not the new smoking. Opioid addiction is. We focus on what’s important but difficult, not what’s meaningless but easy.”
Personal Health Information
True to its mission, Quizzify’s HRA is purely educational and requires no intrusive personal health information (PHI) from employees. Avoiding PHI is key since many employees lie on health risk assessments about drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. The percentage of your own HRA respondents who admit to drinking or smoking should be about 70% and 18% respectively, but instead are a small fraction of those figures on paper. An HRA cannot educate employees who don’t admit to problems, when its branching logic drives off those admissions . By contrast, the Quizzify HRA exposes all employees to fact-based multiple-choice answers reviewed by physicians at Harvard Medical School.
How Quizzify’s HRA Works
The Quizzify HRA is offered in quizzes throughout the year, with employees earning a cumulative score in each of five risk categories:
Diet, exercise, lifestyle
Wise use of the healthcare system
Appropriate screenings and prevention interventions
General health knowledge
Financial literacy
At the end of each quiz, users receive a detailed “report card” that resides on their Quizzify (or platform partner) portal, and their cumulative risk score is updated. Both the report cards and quiz answers include “learn more” links for employees who want a deeper dive. (The links can include redirection to a company’s own resources.) And, because the questions are based on the Quizzify curriculum, the material is – uniquely in the wellness industry – reviewed by doctors at Harvard Medical School.
You can take the HRA quiz here and download your own personal report card. (Although this is our general demo quiz, it serves as an HRA once a report card is generated. It’s as simple as that.)
Quizzify’s HRA Reduces the Legal Risk for Employment-Based Wellness Programs
Barbara J. Zabawa, JD, MPH of the Center for Health and Wellness Law, LLC compares Quizzify’s HRA to the Centers for Disease Control expectations of traditional HRAs:
“An important distinction about Quizzify’s HRA from traditional HRAs…is that the Quizzify HRA does not ask individuals about their personal health measures or habits, in order to avoid both falsified answers and the legal risks of collection PHI... The Quizzify quiz questions are more general and relate to issues that pose a threat to any individual’s health. These health threats can also increase health costs unnecessarily.”
Bottom line: “The Quizzify HRA exceeds the legal requirements while reducing the legal risk for employment-based wellness programs.”
Read the full legal review here.