HealthyWage is a weight-loss initiative with an interesting twist — participants have bet their own money and stand to gain considerable payouts for losing more than other teams. That
Jimmy Flemming, a HealthyWage cofounder, says all of its programs “are well-suited to the workplace because that’s what they’ve been optimized for.” After years of tailoring to the requests of benefits managers’, the company counts “just about 500 corporate and government clients, including not-quite-50 of the Fortune 500” as users of its unusual service.
“There’s a trend toward using
HealthyWage was founded in early 2009, and its objectives and ideology were partially based on research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association the previous December. Employers could well find they pay less (Flemming hastens to point out that his program costs less than Weight Watchers) for better results by using employees’ own money.
Employers are actually discouraged from flipping the bill themselves. Says Flemming: “We instead encourage the company to offer a partial subsidy, so they make it a little less expensive, or to offer a subsidy for, say, the first 200 people to sign up.”
Read more about HealthyWage in the June 1 EBN.