Mayo studying tailored e-mail program module
Will be linked to on-line wellness offerings
In what it says is a first-of-its-kind undertaking, Rochester, MN-based Mayo Clinic HealthQuest has formed a multicompany consortium to study an on-line corporate wellness program with a new added dimension: tailored e-mail messaging.
Consortium members include high-technology firms Intel, Lucent Technologies, and Texas Instruments. Intel has provided a research grant for the study.
"This [on-line wellness programming] is a new medium being used for health promotion," explains Paul Hagen, MD, medical director of Mayo Clinic HealthQuest and a Mayo Clinic preventive medicine specialist. "So, we’re building on the past — the known, helpful health promotion tool of tailored messaging — and linking a Web-based program to e-mail."
The key to the study and "the thing that has never been looked at," according to Hagen, is: What is the impact of tailored messaging linked to a Web site and linked to e-mail? "To my knowledge, no Web-based wellness program has been evaluated this broadly," Hagen adds. "We’ve seen some frustration over programs designed for one or two conditions — this is something a broad-based population can use."
The Web-based program is Mayo Clinic Health-Quest Online, a broad-based comprehensive health promotion program for employees. Within the program Mayo offers a number of modules called "planners" — change-based modules taking into account the health belief and stages-of-change models. It also includes disease-based planners to supplement physician care for chronic illnesses.
Using "travel" jargon, different stages are given specific names. For example, an employee in the preparation stage may be described as on the "road to readiness."
"People move through these stages; assess their readiness to change; the benefits of and barriers to the changes; and in the action phase, they have access to a tailored goal-setting tool," says Hagen.
The Web site addresses health at work, health at home, and individual health — including episodic self-care — and offers a health risk assessment (HRA) instrument.
Three e-mail areas
The e-mail component of the program will be tailored to the various areas in the HealthQuest program, and will have three different functions, based on employee responses to a questionnaire and an HRA. First, it will link employees to areas of interest they have already identified in the survey. Second, the employees will receive needs-based e-mail messages, determined by the results of the HRA. The third general area is for people who are undertaking a change, and will be tailored to help them move through those changes.
With the participation of these three large high-tech companies, Mayo will have a sizable employee base of people with access to computers. "We will first gain their informed consent, and then ask them to complete the questionnaire, which will include an HRA and other health- and disease-based questions," says Hagen. "They will then be randomized into one group that receives the tailored e-mail messaging and one that does not."
The researchers will be measuring what Hagen describes as "global measures of health," which will be ascertained through the initial HRA, and then follow-up studies at one and two years post-launch.
"We’ll examine specific health behaviors, readiness to change, self-efficacy, and disease-based information," he continues. "One of the challenges of such a broad-based program is to show change. When you allow people to self-select, it is more difficult to try assess what sorts of changes have occurred."
Mayo plans to launch the study this summer, beginning with the completion of the initial questionnaires. Then, the two groups will be randomized, and the employees will start using the site.
[Editor’s note: For more information, contact: Jack Schmidt, Mayo Clinic HealthQuest. Telephone: (800) 430-9699.]
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