When a company grows through acquisition it can be hard to blend legacy organizations’ well-being programs into a single cohesive experience for employees. This is exactly the situation our client Atrium Health found themselves in after a period of rapid expansion. WebMD Health Services stepped in to help Atrium Health bring the organization together under one, unified well-being program. Here’s their story…
About Atrium Health
Atrium Health, a WebMD client since 2022, is an integrated nonprofit health system with more than 70,000 teammates serving patients at 40 hospitals and over 1,400 care locations. Based in Charlotte with locations across North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, Atrium Health is a nationally recognized leader in shaping health outcomes through innovative research, education, and compassionate patient care.
The challenge: bring the organization together under one well-being program during a critical time.
As Atrium Health merged with or acquired other health care entities, these legacy organizations often brought along their own well-being programs. This created a confusing mix of messages and resources for teammates. On top of this, as the stressors of the pandemic ramped up, Atrium Health knew it needed to standardize the well-being program to be able to provide the right resources to staff.
To start, we helped Atrium Health articulate their mission statement for the LiveWELL program:
To enrich a culture of well-being tailored to the needs of Atrium Health teammates that creates a consistent, scalable experience for all through an award-winning program.
Next, we worked with the team to articulate their goals:
- Create a cohesive well-being program without making it too complex.
- Understand the different needs of a dispersed population.
- Deliver value and make an impact with a Wellness Champion Network.
- Achieve realistic engagement goals.
To achieve their goals, Atrium Health focused on four foundational elements.
1. Personalized program design.
The WebMD ONE platform allows Atrium Health to personalize a participant’s well-being journey based on their health risk, readiness to change, and interests, and recognizes that all the dimensions of well-being are interdependent.
2. A rewards strategy that encourages participation across all the dimensions of well-being.
Atrium Health’s rewards program provides incentives for engaging in activities that focus on physical health, financial wellness and personal well-being. The more activities participants complete, the more rewards they earn.
3. A multi-channel communication approach.
Using the taglines “LiveWELL is here for you” and “We care about your physical, financial and personal well-being,” the team leveraged a range of tactics to meet people wherever they might be in their well-being journey:
- Digital: webinars, videos, podcasts, intranet banner, social media posts (Yammer), monitors in some locations, monthly online well-being calendars.
- Print: postcards, home mailers, bulletin boards with flyers and QR codes people could easily scan.
- Email: monthly email celebrating teammate accomplishments and providing important info in a “Did you know?” format.
- Manager communication: “Leaders: Know This” emails with information specifically for managers.
- In-person: Champion networks and onsite events.
4. A robust Wellness Champion Network.
To build a culture of well-being and encourage participation in events, Atrium Health relied on their Wellness Champion Network, which consists of about 600 LiveWELL Champions across the organization. Their goal is to recruit 1,000 Champions by the end of 2023.
Our WebMD Dedicated Well-Being Staff partnered with Atrium Health Wellness Champions to provide training, resources, turn-key tools and boots-on-the-ground support for both virtual and onsite events. Having this type of visible, dedicated staff onsite is helping to move the LiveWELL program beyond just a “rewards program” and into the fabric of Atrium Health’s culture. The Wellness Champions also create the all-important social support that’s so key to changing health behaviors.
Atrium Health has set high, but achievable, goals for the next four years.
Bringing together a multitude of different well-being programs and messages isn’t easy—and achieving their goals will take time. But Atrium Health is already seeing great results.
In 2022, the first year of the standardized program, they set a goal of getting 20% of participants to register and engage with the well-being platform (for example, completing an activity or chatting with a health coach). They exceeded this goal by eight percent!
Over the next four years, they hope to build on their success by encouraging even more engagement with the program, which they define as completion of the Health Assessment and at least one incentive activity.
Atrium Health believes a good well-being program is all about reaching the right people at the right time. By focusing on a few foundational elements like personalized support, a robust rewards program, an active Wellness Champion Network and consistent communication, Atrium Health is making it easy for teammates to understand the program and to take that first step toward better health, no matter where they are in their well-being journey. To read more about Atrium Health’s successful program, click here.
