Astounding weight loss since launch of county wellness program

A new study conducted by the county’s health care economist, John Scoggins, looked at anonymous wellness assessment results from 2006 – 2011 and found that since the program began, 2,029 Healthy Incentives^SM program participants have lost at least 5 percent of their weight. Research shows people begin to see health benefits from weight loss when they lose at least 5 percent of their weight.

The study also shows that the Health Matters weight management programs were particularly effective for African-Americans and those who had not graduated from college.

The most in-depth study of this kind ever conducted, the data show combined, Healthy Incentives^SM participants shed 28,327 pounds in their first year of the program alone. Scoggins will seek to publish the results in a medical journal. As Scoggins prepares his paper for submission, Health Matters wanted you to know about these astounding results first.

“These were not the results I was expecting when I started looking at the data,” said Scoggins. “Across the country we’re seeing people getting heavier. There’s a national obesity epidemic that is making people very sick and driving up health care costs. It’s incredible that this many people have lost enough weigh to improve their health. Clearly, something is happening at King County that is outside the norm.”

Questions about individual weight and height were answered by 97.3% of those who took the wellness assessment. As participants know, these are used to calculate body mass index (BMI). A BMI of 25 – 29.9 is considered overweight, 30 – 39.9 is considered obese and more than 40 is morbidly obese. Above normal weight is associated with many chronic health conditions including diabetes and heart disease.

Scoggins compared the body mass index of Healthy Incentives^SM participants from 2006 – 2011 to a similar group from the general population in the United States. To get the comparison group, Scoggins took a sample from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), which is commonly used as a general population comparison group in national studies. His sample included only people aged 18-69 who had health insurance from an employer or union.

Scoggins’ study showed that in addition to  overweight people losing weight, Healthy Incentives^SM also caused a significant reduction in the number of normal-weight members becoming overweight (31% reduction during 2006-2007).

Weight Watchers at Work^® has played an important role in supporting employees with weight loss goals. Since 2006 when employees started attending meetings at county worksites, participants have lost 15,033 pounds, or 7.5 tons, and 44 people have achieved “lifetime” status. Lifetime status is when a Weight Watchers member reaches a healthy weight loss goal and stays within 2 pounds of it for at least 6 weeks.

This kind of data analysis is not only helpful to county program managers in continuously improving the program to be as effective as possible, but it is useful to others studying the impacts of  wellness programs or considering implementation of a wellness program. The county gets more than a hundred calls each year from public and private employers all over the country looking for advice on best practices for implementing wellness programs. All data used by the county in its analysis are de-identified meaning any information that could potentially identify an individual is removed.