Thrive Summit

4 sessions, 8 speakers, invaluable insight

As employers and health plans, it’s easy to get hung up on the numbers. In this track, in-person Thrive attendees learned how to identify and prevent additional health care costs by understanding and supporting their populations through insights and a strong wellbeing program. 

Relive and/or learn about some of the creative ideas and best practices we heard from many of our innovative expert speakers below.

Top takeaways

1. Know your member populations and their social determinants of health (SDoH) so you can provide health and wellbeing programs that align with their needs and interests.  
   • Review your population to understand their unique characteristics, including age and generations, genders, location, salary, race, religion, and employment status. 
2. Help members who view cost as a barrier to receiving care through your incentive strategy: 
   • Offer a discount on medical premiums 
   • Provide incentives to encourage engagement and deposit earned rewards into members’ health reimbursement arrangement accounts.  
   • Allow members to earn Virgin Pulse points for completing activities as part of your VP partner offerings.  
3. Help your members overcome obstacles by enhancing your Virgin Pulse experience: 
   • Add and deploy My Care Checklist, onsite health screenings, and postcard mailings 
   • Work with Virgin Pulse to ingest your medical and pharmacy claims for analysis 
   • Add new opportunities to earn points, like designating a beneficiary, attending retirement webinars, or meet with a retirement planning partner 
   • Run mental health and wellbeing challenges and destination challenges 
   • Enable Virgin Pulse’s content on DEI, healthy eating, getting active, reducing stress, sleeping well, and productivity. 
4. Ensure your organization embodies a culture that supports health and wellbeing: 
   • Consider hosting a food drive and helping contribute to local food pantries to help members overcome food insecurity. 
   • Offer training on SDoH content to help managers identify and provide resources to members who show signs that could be considered as concerns for SDoH. 
   • Confirm you have policies and practices in place to ensure your members are taken care of, have safe working conditions, and don’t have work factors that impede their ability to do their jobs. 
5. With the growing costs and complexity of healthcare, and only 12% of your population understanding the benefits available to them, organizations are looking for a solution to help members get the most out of their available benefits. 
   • Virgin Pulse’s VP Navigate helps connect your members to the right benefit when they need it most in a platform that they visit regularly. 
   • Offer your members personalized guidance and get deeper engagement to help them achieve their health and wellbeing goals with the Virgin Pulse’s Engage platform, VP Navigate, and Guides. 
   • Coming soon: VP Navigate+ offers a centralized search to find care, talk to a doctor virtually, estimate on procedure costs, medical claims details, steerage to quality providers, and nurse advocates for care coordination.  
6. 85% of employers feel data is extremely important in making benefits decisions. 
7. Virgin Pulse has more data than anyone else – how can our data do more for you? 
   • (OPTIMIZE) VP Impact – Decision support tool for where to invest to maximize target business, clinical or financial outcomes 
   • (SAVE) VP Claims Insight – All in one cost, quality, and utilization optimization reports and recommendations based on claims, lab, and other health data 
   • (AVOID) VP Enrichment – Data extract or API supplementing client data with predictive model results for acquisition, growth, utilization, conditions, quality measures, and SDoH 
8. The mind and body are connected more than we think. We often think about them discreetly and they are often treated separately.
   • Patients may struggle with depression who also have physical ailments, for example, they vomit at work because they have a panic attack or they have depression because they have physical ailments that limit or restrict them from living their lives.
9. 4 essentials for self-care – Virgin Pulse offering, include: 
   • Sleep 
   • Movement 
   • Nutrition 
   • Mindfulness 

Impactful speaker quotes

In regards to Virgin Pulse's VP Navigate, "Virgin Pulse is 4.5 out of 5 stars in the app store. People are coming every day and enjoyoing it because it's all about them. And why not fold into that experience, an understanding of all the great benefits that you're offering, and better steerage into how they can better utilize their healthcare system in order to drive the best outcomes for everyone." - Laura Walmsley, Virgin Pulse

“The conditions within the environment where you are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, or age that affect your health or your quality of life—and we have to constantly think about those social determinants of health as we look at what we’re doing from a wellness perspective.” - Tamie Anderson, SCL Health (now Intermountain Healthcare)

“What we are working toward building a platform where if I logged in and Divya logged in, we’d have totally different experiences.” - Phil Fiero, Virgin Pulse 

After having attendees do 10 squats, compliment their neighbor and celebrate one another: “In about 30 seconds you just increased blood flow to all parts of your body, you increased your circulation and heart rate, so you’re going to stimulate blood flow to the brain. Also, I heard you laughing, so that means that you’re stimulating that part of the brain which receives reward which will help you to remember things better. Then you gave someone a compliment which made them feel good and they complimented you back which made you feel good which creates this dynamic experience that you will again, remember. And then finally, you celebrated because who doesn’t like a celebration? It creates community and connection and these are the very things we lost during covid and we just created it in about 30 seconds. This was my visual representation to you that it doesn’t take a whole bunch of money and a huge effort to make these small changes that can be felt by your whole organization.” - Julie Wilkes, Accenture