When Sangeetha Iyer,* a 28-year-old business analyst with mid-tier IT firm MindTree, decided it was time to do something about being underweight, she turned to a dietitian for help. Except that the dietitian she consulted was not in a clinic but on the portal customised for her company by ChiHealth, an online wellness company. For two weeks, Iyer says, she had to enter the details of every meal she ate. After the fortnight, she would be provided a diet plan to help her put on weight.
With lifestyle- and stress-related illnesses in offices reported to be on the rise and human resources teams eager to be seen as doing the right thing, corporate India seems to be turning to firms like ChiHealth to provide employee wellness solutions in-house. ChiHealth's model is simple: employees of the companies that sign it on get access to a customised website where they can read various articles on health and wellness, engage with a dietitian, counsellor or doctor and post queries. The company also emails the employees newsletters on health, provides health-risk assessments and wellness coaching, as well as tests with biometric kits. Based on the aggregate data of employees it gathers, it conducts workshops and advises the companies on which ailments might be most common among employees and what steps need to be taken. "We found that employees were typically reluctant to be seen at a dietitian's or counsellor's office, so we decided to go online," says ChiHealth CEO Karthik Rao. The cost of using ChiHealth depends on the size of the package and the company - from Rs 15,000 per month for companies with less than 1,000 employees to Rs 22 per employee per month for larger companies.(EMPLOYEE DATA INSIGHTS: 25–35 YEARS)
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Neither is ChiHealth the only company offering online wellness solutions to companies. Healthcare Magic, which launched five years ago, has a slightly different model. Employees can post medical or health-related queries on a customised web portal and one of the 7,100 doctors that have signed on with Healthcare Magic will reply within an hour or two. The fact that an MBBS doctor is replying to an employee's query at no cost to him or her (the company pays for it) has a "wow-creating effect" and earns the employer brownie points, says Healthcare Magic's founder-CEO, Kunal Sinha. The doctors are signed on after they provide copies of their MBBS certificates and their Medical Council of India registration number. Sinha says the company helps employees with diets online as well, accompanied by follow-up calls after a week, a month and three months.
Girish Rao, the CEO of Bangalore-headquartered Vidal Health, which provides online and offline wellness solutions, says his company looks at how employees energy levels can be enhanced, to increase productivity. "For example, one of the solutions we have is measuring the biological age of employees which depends on how your body has aged, and differs from their calendar age. We also have programmes to guide the employees to improve fitness, and others on diet and nutrition."
And interest from companies seems to be growing. ChiHealth, which started with five clients in 2008, now works with 110 companies across the country, including IT majors Infosys and Wipro. Healthcare Magic counts 88 companies as clients, while Vidal works with 50.
But while all this sounds great on paper, how effective are these programmes? A year go, when one of India's leading private banks, which does not wish to be identified, opted for biometric screening of its employees, stress was one of the problems that showed up in the results. "Close to 67 per cent of our employees across India participated in the test," says an official at the bank. Based on the results which emerged, the company modified its wellness programmes and the counselling sessions for its employees. With help from the wellness company, the bank also worked towards modifying the type of food served in its cafeteria - "for example, we now offer high-fibre cookies." This year, the bank intends to conduct the biometric tests again to see if there has been any change as a result of the lifestyle changes that have been promoted in the last one year. "We will also see what our medical expenses have been, measured against wellness programmes," says the official. Infosys, Wipro and MindTree declined to comment for the article, citing company policy.
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While these companies might be able to increase awareness about health and wellness among employees, other claims are hard to substantiate - on its website, for example, ChiHealth cites a reduction in the number of insurance claims as well as the ability to bargain for a lower premium from health insurers as benefits for employers. In principle, the idea is that certain health markers like employee cholestrol level, for example, could be improved by engaging with ChiHealth's health and wellness programmes, and once biometric tests confirm this, the employer can bargain with the insurance company for a lower premium. "Close to 50 of our clients have been able to use our programme as a negotiating tool," says ChiHealth's Rao. Healthcare Magic's Sinha says though he does not have figures, those clients that have been using its services for at least two years have seen the number of claims reducing and adds that clients have told him they use Healthcare Magic's services as a negotiating tool with insurance companies.
But insurers and brokerages are sceptical. "The bulk of the claims in India are for employees' parents and unless preventive healthcare filters down to parents and spouses, I don't see how these programmes would have a significant impact. Even for the employee, the kind of wellness programme that would actually affect claims would require them to make a paradigm shift in their lifestyle and not just go online and fill in certain metrics," says Purandar Bhavani, director of Medimanage Health Insurance.
Vidal Healthcare's Rao concurs with this view and says the focus should be on employee wellness and not reducing insurance claims. "For real benefits to accrue, it will take at least two to three years of constant, targeted engagement with the employees," says Arvind Ladha, CEO of Vantage Insurance Brokers.
Communication is key. But effective engagement is no cakewalk. Terence Jose*, an executive with Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore, says he has been receiving emails from ChiHealth but he has not read most of them. "One has a tendency to ignore such mails, since we receive so many of them," says Jose. The only email he can recall is one where the company conducted a nutrition quiz, which offered an iPad as a prize. And though MindTree's Iyer had signed up to get dietary guidance, she admits that she lost interest mid-way.
Vidal's Rao agrees that it is a challenge to get employees to take notice and says the company has a behavioural consultant who advises them on how messages should be framed. "If you tell a 25-year-old employee he will develop xyz ailments in 20 years he will not be interested, because to him, 20 years is far off," says Rao. But if you tell him that he will end up being like VVS Laxman instead of Virat Kohli, you will have his attention, he says.
Nevertheless, it might take a while for companies to gauge whether such engagements have any real impact, especially to the bottom line. "Right now, this market is at a very very nascent stage," says Bhavani.
* Names of employees changed on request as they are not authorised to speak to the media
