My Plan For Health

Don’t forget to go to the annual health and wellness fair, “Rally for Wellness,” tomorrow (Thursday, September 17) from 10:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. at RPAC.

If you don’t go, you will miss the following:

• Free food
• Free screenings for skin cancer, osteoporosis, vision, and hearing
• All the health and wellness info you could imagine, and more
• Cash-only farmers’ market with fresh local produce
• Brutus Buckeye
• People watching
• Possible strange and amusing behavior from your coworkers (maybe that’s just me)

Admission is… FREE!

Free Your Plan For Health biometric screenings are also being offered… or, should I say, free biometric screening, singular. I just took the next-to-last available spot. Ha!

If you can make it to RPAC at 10:40 a.m., register for your screening now, before that last lonely spot is gone! Go to the YP4H Web site, and click on the link for “Faculty/Staff Schedule Your Biometric Screening” (on the right-hand side).

YP4H welcome screen

Gretchen Feldmann, YP4H Communications Manager, gave me lots of great information about the PHA test. Here’s what I learned:

Since the YP4H program was launched in 2006, approximately half of the 25,000 Ohio State faculty and staff have taken the PHA. In 2008, 37 percent took it. Those are good numbers! When I think of all my fellow employees and how busy we all are, the fact that half of us made the time to take the test is wonderful.

Based on those numbers, I gather that I was among the 13 percent (or so) of people who took the test in prior years, but didn’t take it in 2008. I can’t speak for the others (most of us probably just forgot, right?) but I just didn’t want to look at the numbers, you know?

Here’s why the PHA is the best place to start your YP4H experience, according to Feldmann:

…[W]e have designed the PHA so that it serves as a “gateway” into the YP4H initiative. In other words, employees need to complete their PHA in order to participate in the Incentive Program and to take advantage of the health coaching services. Additionally, by completing the PHA, their yourplanforhealth.com experience will be much more robust because the platform is designed to give an employee a truly customized experience (i.e. the more information they enter, the more customized the site will be for them).

I can testify to that; since I took the PHA, the Web site has started offering me specific health information based on my goals and my family medical history. My next steps, including biometric screening and health coaching, are clearly spelled out for me.

Here’s what she said about how often we should take the test:

Re: when employees should take their PHA, we communicate to employees that they should complete their PHA (the online questionnaire – some employees are still confused in thinking that the “PHA” means the biometric screening) once a year. The reason is two-fold: 1) to get an annual pulse on their health condition (i.e. Did their health improve? Are there other health indicators to be concerned about?, etc.); and 2) to lock in their premium reduction for the following benefit year. Completing the PHA is not a one-time event – it’s an annual event. Employees can certainly log in and update their PHA throughout the year as they lose weight, get off medications, etc. in order to generate a new personal summary report.

That’s my plan. If knowledge is power, I can’t avoid looking at the numbers any more.

My PHA score

Today I took the YP4H Personal Health Assessment (PHA) test online. The results were not entirely what I expected, but I give a “thumbs up” to the new test, as administered by WebMD. I took the original test when it first became available in 2007, and the WebMD system is certainly snazzier, complete with colorful graphs and animations.

After that initial PHA test, I never went back to the old YP4H Web site.  Ideally, we should all take the test at least once a year, in order to update it with our most current health data (weight, cholesterol, etc.). I’ve heard that I’m not the only one to slack off, and that fewer Ohio State faculty and staff have taken the test every year since it was first offered.

This is sad news, for several reasons. YP4H is, after all, an incentive program, meaning that by participating we earn a discount of $15/month on our health insurance premiums for the year. Who doesn’t want a discount? The healthier we are, the lower the healthcare costs for the university and for ourselves. So everybody wins. Plus, we get to enjoy better health, which, as my colleague Emily Caldwell said to me the other day, is “kind of a gift in itself.”

Gretchen Feldmann is the communications director for YP4H, and when I first started this blog she offered to help me with any info I needed. So I’ve asked Gretchen to give me the stats on how many employees have taken advantage of the PHA test each year. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Now that I’ve taken it again, I am impressed with the test’s ease of use, and the clarity with which it explained my results.

After a few pages of simple health questions (some of which I had to leave blank, because I just didn’t have the data, such as my most recent cholesterol numbers), an animated box displayed my PHA health score: 65. My peers (women aged 30-39) had an average score of 80, it read.

Below that were a set of sliding controls, where I could adjust the key risk factors that affect my health, and see how those adjustments would change my score in the future. Apparently the test indicated that I was highly stressed ["Who you callin' stressed?!?! Grrrr!!!"] and overweight. So it recommended that I reduce both stress and weight. I saw that by dialing down both of those factors, I could raise my PHA score to something as good as — or better than — my peers.

My risk factors, in an adjustable graph

It also showed me how health changes could reduce my risk of developing certain health conditions. As I dialed my weight up or down, animated graphs showed how the risks changed. For instance, here is my risk for developing a musculoskeletal condition now:

…And here it is after I’ve reduced both my stress and weight to the lowest levels possible on the graph:

I suppose a livable reality is somewhere in the middle.

I wasn’t surprised to see that stress affected my chance of developing a musculoskeletal disorder. I’d already learned from working with Bill Marras, director of the university’s Biodynamics Laboratories and our newest member of the National Academy of Engineering, that stress can lead to back injury. When we’re stressed, we use our muscles differently than when we’re relaxed — and we inadvertently increase the forces on our spine.

I was a little surprised to see that one year of messing around with cigarettes in my youth [Hey, I was a good kid, and just wanted to do something "bad" before I was too old to be stupid.] apparently means that I am at high risk for developing lung cancer for the rest of my life:

There appeared to be no way to adjust my risk factors to reduce my lung cancer risk. Ever. That doesn’t seem right to me.

I get lots of exercise. Ha! Take that, peers!

The test also offered “condition reports” and “risk reports” which detailed my results in plain language. Much appreciated! For instance, I read:

Congratulations, Pamela! Your exercise and strength training routine currently meets national health standards for the recommended total minutes of exercise in a week.

Woo-hoo! I had told it that I do aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, six days a week. This is a bit of an underestimate, since water aerobics takes up most of an hour, and I do that three times a week. So I get lots of cardio. The one thing I don’t do is strength training, e.g. weight lifting. ‘Cause, really, who needs strength training, right? I kept reading…

However, national guidelines say that the best exercise routine is a combination of both aerobic and strength-training activities.

Uh, oh.

You reported that you currently do aerobic exercise 180 minutes a week and strength train 0 minutes per week… To optimize your health, you should aim to meet the requirements for both aerobic and strength training in your routine.

Sigh. Ah well. I have joined the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program, and will have my first physical assessment next week. After that, PAES faculty and staff will give me advice on how to design an exercise program that will most benefit me. Why do I think they’re going to mention strength training?