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Fitbit Wants To Help Corporations Track Employee Health
jfruh writes: Fitbit is pitching its iconic fitness trackers to businesses as a tool to save money on health care costs. Many companies have wellness programs to encourage workers to exercise more, and Fitbit will help employers quantify (and monitor) employee progress. “We think virtually every company will incorporate fitness trackers into their corporate wellness programs,” Fitbit CFO Bill Zerella said
Old news, my company started it last year. It is an optional program, but you are necouraged as you get a free fitbit, and money if you hit certain goals.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I work for the University of Washington (so I'm a state employee), and starting with 2015 our health plan has included a "wellness incentive" which, if met, drops $125 off an employee's annual deductible. For this current year, it was a simple matter of making a couple attestations ("I don't smoke", "I exercise at least 3 days a week"). For 2016, though, it's gotten a bit more intrusive - one of the ways you can earn points towards the incentive is to record daily step counts and exceed 35000 steps per week, which you could either do manually or by giving the website access to your FitBit data (it also supported several other trackers). Other ways to earn points included "Try Tai Chi", "Fill out an Advance Directive", "See a Mentor", "No Stress Mondays", and so on.
Given the move Washington State has made towards both intrusiveness and nanny-state-dom, and given that by state law pretty much all our job-related data is public record, I would not be surprised if at some point people who gave permission to access their fitness trackers to find that someone in the monitoring chain started checking when activity is occurring. This could be a problem for someone if, like me, they often don't get a conventional lunch hour due to job duties. I'm often eating after 1pm (or even after 2pm) simply because it works better with tasks I'm doing - so when I go for my lunchtime walk, it's not usually between 12 and 1. Fortunately I'm not naive enough to give them access to my Garmin Viviosmart data, but a less paranoid person could end up with a nasty surprise come annual evaluation time.
#DeleteChrome
That's the concern. Optional benefits (on campus gym, free/reduced cost gym membership, paid personal trainers, reimbursement for exercise classes, paying for home equipment) are cool. Forcing people is not. And if an employer is tracking my health, that falls into category 2 not category 1.
I have not yet heard of an employer actually forcing people (and I would hear of things being in the benefits administration field). But, I have seen employers raise the price of health insurance, and then offer a "discount" for participation in healthy incentives.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Actually, United Healthcare program you are referring to covers use of tobacco products. The FDA doesn't currently categorize e-cigarettes as a tobacco product so they don't count, for now. I know because we have United Healthcare and I filled out this form about a month ago and it specifically mentions that e-cigs are not currently recognized as tobacco products.