Faith-Based University Sees Double Digit Improvement in Multiple Health Condition Rates
Searching for Growth
Identifying the Challenge:
Point Loma Nazarene University is a faith-based liberal arts school located in San Diego, California. They quickly outgrew their bare-bones wellness program, which consisted of fitness trackers, paperwork, and the honor system. What they didn’t want, however, was rigid programming that wouldn’t accommodate the staff’s diverse needs.
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Critical Exploration
Considering the Options:
To get a feel for their available options, a visit to the National Wellness Institute Conference was in order. “My predecessor attended this conference and met WellRight there,” explains Samara Timms, Director of Benefits and Wellness at PLNU. “They sent her WellRight’s 21 Habits book and spoke with them about their program and platform.” After speaking to a few different vendors, it became obvious that WellRight was the perfect fit.
A Helping Hand
Building a Solution:
“Integrating WellRight was really easy,” says Samara. “We were asking so many questions about what we should do and what ideas they might have for us, and they held our hands through the entire process.”
Once they were up and running, Samara and her team were thrilled to see how customizable and flexible the challenges are. They were able to create new challenges that were deeply meaningful to their organization, like the annual “Meet Me at the Manger,” where 85 employees logged 100 miles of walking to honor Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem.
In addition, they loved how easy the program is to access and administer. Where the team used to spend 26 hours on average every week administering their wellness program, that has plummeted to about 10. Samara explains, “We’ve been able to provide an even more robust program to our employees. Using the WellRight platform has taken a lot of the administrative work off our plates, giving us more time to plan educational lunch and learns, launch a wellness website, and set up health coaching and gym discounts for our employees instead of being bogged down by tracking.”
Time spent on program administration has dropped from 26 to 10 hours per week.
Whole-Person Wellness
Loving the Results:
Since implementing the program and platform in early 2017, PLNU’s results have been extraordinary. Health outcomes across multiple conditions have shown double-digit percentage improvements, including a staggering 42 percent drop in pre-diabetes rates.
Not only are employees healthier, they’re enjoying themselves more as well. Engagement with the program has increased by about 50 percent, aided by the automation and text tracking that WellRight provides. With over 200 challenges and limitless customizable challenges, employees try new challenges from categories like emotional, financial, occupational, purpose, and social. It takes them beyond just physical and nutritional challenges.
“Every day I get feedback from people about the program, telling me how much they enjoyed a particular challenge,” Samara says. “Between the flexibility, the responsiveness of the WellRight team, and the neverending variety, we’re getting amazing results that make us happy, our health insurer happy, and our staff happy.”