Disclaimer: We aren’t picking on Viverae because they don’t measure their outcomes according to the standards of the wellness industry. We are picking on Vivarae because they do measure their outcomes according to the standards of the wellness industry. And that’s exactly the problem: The wellness industry is five years behind the disease management industry in outcomes measurement, which is like being five years behind Iraq in democracy. Viverae is simply doing a better job than its competitors showing customers what they want to see: Savings that we all want to believe in, notwithstanding math and common sense.

For that reason we are introducing a new concept: The Wishful Thinking Multiplier. It is defined as % first year cost savings claimed/% risks reduced. (Or in the case of disease management, % first year cost savings/% improvement in HEDIS scores.)

Consider this case study. High-risk people as a group reduced risk factors by 3%. But Viverae claims a 17% improvement in first-year trend for participants as a whole (including participants who did not reduce their risk at all). That’s almost a 6x first-year “wishful thinking multiplier,” the highest we’ve ever seen. Of course, there was no plausibility check or auditor’s letter. Not that it would have mattered if there had been – there simply aren’t 17% of costs that are related to claims that can be avoided in a year through simple risk reduction, so no auditor would have vouched for it.

Compare this Wishful Thinking Multiplier to the “Gold Standard” of Wellness Outcomes Measurement evaluations, “The Impact of the Highmark Employee Wellness Programs on 4-Year Healthcare Costs” in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, February 2008. Note that the participant-vs-non-participant separation wasn’t 17% in the first year. It was more like about 0% for the first three years, despite substantial program uptake by the participants.

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