5. Hearing how we make a difference in people’s lives

Just about every day we hear people telling us – in their own words – about the impact that Eliza outreach has on their lives. Here are a few randomly chosen examples from today (and yes, we realize that we are blessed to be able to be able to just randomly choose a few comments of the day that are as goosebump-inducing as these):

“Thank you very much for this message. I wrote down everything that she said and I do know I’m overdue for both of those so…this is the little kick I needed to take this to heart and follow-up with this stuff so I will go make my appointment. Thank you and have a good day. Bye-bye.”

“Thank you very much for providing this helpful information in Spanish which is my first language. Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

“Ma’am I think the reminder is great and I am really satisfied with [Health Plan name]. I am very thankful to God and I hope you continue doing this.”

4. A magical playground for analytics geeks

So. Much. Data.

3. You never know when your work will be interrupted by something fun

Your fearless leaders sumo wrestling? A company-wide email that gets everyone brainstorming ideas for the perfect analogy to use as part of a big presentation? Beer Friday? In some ways it’s a wonder we get anything accomplished – but as it turns out, these are exactly the kinds of distractions that keep us running strong and working as a team. Because really, you can’t help but share an inside joke once you’ve collectively experienced the singing clown.

2. Amazing, innovative, creative, unstoppable, even brave colleagues

Most of the time those adjectives describe how we approach our work, but once in a while we can’t help but be amazed at some of the creative ways that our colleagues address life challenges – as illustrated by this lightly censored email exchange by members of our senior management team:

1.Good karma

There’s just got to be some positive payback in working so hard to positively impact how people view and manage their health. So to all our clients and partners and supporters, we thank you for joining us on this wild ride.

Here’s to happy, healthy, and prosperous new year!

It may not come as a surprise to many, but it is worth thinking about, especially for those of us in the business of trying to engage people in conversation about topics beyond field trip permission slips – such as how we care for our health.

At Eliza we do a lot of looking at different population segments and developing messaging that will resonate based on key characteristics – from traditional socio-demographic things like lifestage, gender, region, and clinical conditions as well as more unorthodox markers that get at people’s motivation, behaviors, and attitudes around their health.

Beyond this, there are these ‘lifestyle’ categories – like the bleary-eyed new mother trying to keep it all together – that also inform the way we approach and engage. We know that talking about whether or not you’ll get that recommended mammogram, or why you’re not refilling your prescription, or your satisfaction level with your doctor might be last on your list of things to do.

But it’s important to acknowledge these realities that exist in the lives of the people we’re reaching out to. So we design our interactions accordingly. And if we can get through to you before the pasta boils over on the stove, and get you to really think about why you can’t put off that preventive screening any longer, and if we can actually help you cross one thing OFF your to-do list by transferring you in real time to schedule an appointment, then we will have helped.

As for mountain of dirty laundry piling up, it can wait another day. And believe us, we empathize.

*percent of US population that’s female according to 2010 US Census data

A trite expression, often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.

Cliché #1 - When it rains it pours
Saturday starts with a trip to the ER because I can’t stop coughing, was diagnosed with a viral infection, got to the 24hour Walgreens, but the technician on duty went home sick and they can’t fill prescriptions until later. It’s literally pouring rain outside and I look out and the sprinklers on the front lawn are running, while the neighbor is writing the infraction down in her notebook. All I want to do is lie down, but when I get into the bed the dogs have brought in their favorite toys from the backyard, which are wet and covered with mud and they are playing with them under my sheets.

Cliché #2 - People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones or That’s the Kettle calling the Pot Black
My job entails dispensing advice and guidance to people on a regular basis. Sometimes the lines between personal and work life blur and people seek out my help on a number of issues. I am well known for telling people to take care of themselves, how important their health and welfare is above all else, etc. My yearly check-up this week included the news that everything was too high - weight, blood pressure, cholesterol - and even though my life resembles an HBO sitcom, I’m advised that I have to take care of myself.
Hypocrisy is extremely enlightening and powerful. Time to get back on the treadmill and get rid of the Coke.

Cliché #3 - It’s Just a Midlife Crisis
Nope - the divorce papers came in the mail today and it isn’t just a new car or new girlfriend that my ex-husband is looking for. It’s a new life. I guess that’s why my ipod is filled with break-up songs that I sing at the top of my lungs. Not to recite another cliché but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I was also reminded by a very smart woman (known around here as Alex) that I will look back and be grateful and realize that everything that has happened has made me into the person I am today. Not quite there yet, but am feeling like I am on that path.

Cliché #4 - The Acorn Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree
Today I listened to my 13-year old daughter explain to me that she wants to live with her father full-time because I am mean and rude and send her to her room and he doesn’t. Hmmm, am I the only adult here? The look on her face is one that I know well, and I know where she got it from. It took every ounce of strength I had to not get angry and understand that she is hurting as well. I need to think of her well-being right now, and if that means not trashing her father, and letting her spend more time with him, that’s what I will do. It’s not easy being an adult.

Cliché #5 - When the Going gets Tough, the Tough Get Going
For the first time in my life I finally, truly understand this and have made it my new mantra. For every crappy thing that happened this week, there were at least if not more positive things that happened as well. Why do I focus on only the negative? Why does anyone? Because it is easier - it actually takes more effort to be positive. Now don’t get me wrong - I spent hours crying (and singing break-up songs), but once I did that, I began to really think things through and started to formulate a plan.

Just doing that, coming up with actionable items that would start me working on my clichéd life, to improve it, made a huge difference. Inaction is debilitating in so many ways. What else did I do? I donated money to the local pet shelter, took my dogs for a walk, and signed up to be a Big Sister. On my way out now to buy gifts for my godchildren that I will surprise them with tomorrow.

I think I have turned that frown upside down!!!!

We recently had the pleasure of learning from someone who’s been there, done that, so to speak – Rosemarie Day of Day Health Strategies.

As the founding Deputy Director & Chief Operating Officer of Massachusetts’ health insurance exchange (the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority), Day played a significant role in launching the first state-run health insurance exchange in the United States.

Given this experience, she knows what’s needed to compete and win in the exchange marketplace. In fact, she is currently consulting to over half a dozen states and numerous private companies on health insurance exchange implementation.

She sat down with our own Marc Jeffreys to talk about discussing the state of the exchanges today, learnings so far, and how consumer engagement and satisfaction can drive a competitive conversion strategy.

To listen in, just register here to gain access to the recording.

Seems almost more fitting than usual this year – the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring – people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now – love it or hate it – it’s the Occupy Wall Street movement that’s got people talking.

Smart people (like our good friend Susannah Fox) have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn’t an issue we need to raise our fists about…it’s an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.

It’s a mission that’s driven by all the personal stories we’ve heard of people who’ve seen their loved ones suffer unnecessarily at the end of their lives.

It’s driven by that ripping-off-the-band-aid feeling of relief you get when you’ve finally broached the subject of end of life wishes with your family, free from the burden of just not knowing what they’d want for themselves, and knowing you could advocate for these wishes if your loved one weren’t able to speak up for themselves.

And it’s driven by knowing that this is a conversation that needs to happen early, and often. One of the greatest gifts you can give the ones you love is making sure you’re all on the same page. In the words of the amazing Atul Gawande – you only die once! Die the way you want. Make sure your loved ones get that same gift. And there is a way to engage in this topic with grace…

Here are the five questions – read them, consider them, answer them (you can securely save your answers on the Engage with Grace site), share your answers with your loved ones. It doesn’t matter what your answers are, it just matters that you know them for yourself, and for your loved ones. And they for you.

We all know the power of a group that decides to assemble. In fact, we recently spent an amazing couple of days with the members of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care – or C-TAC – working together to channel so much of the extraordinary work that organizations are already doing to improve the quality of care for our country’s sickest and most vulnerable.

Noted journalist Eleanor Clift gave an amazing talk – finding a way to weave humor and joy into her telling of the story she shared in this Health Affairs article. She elegantly sums up (as only she can) the reason that we have this blog rally every year:

“For too many physicians, that conversation is hard to have, and families, too, are reluctant to initiate a discussion about what Mom or Dad might want until they’re in a crisis, which isn’t the best time to make these kinds of decisions. Ideally, that conversation should begin at the kitchen table with family members, rather than in a doctor’s office.”

It’s a conversation you need to have wherever and whenever you can – and the more people you can rope into it, the better! Make this conversation a part of your Thanksgiving weekend – there will be a right moment – you just might not realize how right it was until you begin the conversation.

This is a time to be inspired, informed…to tackle our challenges in real, substantive, and scalable ways. Participating in this blog rally is just one small – yet huge – way that we can each keep that fire burning in our bellies, long after the turkey dinner is gone.

Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season. Let’s Engage with Grace together.

To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was developed by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.

My parents spent time every morning and night doing hip exercises with my chubby little legs to try and groove out the sockets that so that I would have a chance of walking correctly.

As I learned to walk, the brace and treatment seemed to have done their magic. In fact, starting at age 6, I took dance for almost 20 years.

But running was never something I was able to do without pain or just frustration at how slow I was. My legs just did not move in any way that they should to make me an effective runner and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get past a mile without stopping.

I wanted to be a runner so badly - one of my biggest goals was to run a marathon…so much so that I would watch the start of the Boston marathon on TV each year with tears running down my face.

Last year, just to see, I joined a beginners running clinic in Salem, MA with the hopes that maybe one day I could learn to run 5 miles without stopping and without pain. The first clinic, I was doubled over gasping for air after running the first 100 meters.

But slowly, I learned how to run a 200 meter sprint. And then a 400 meter sprint. And then a mile. And then last Thanksgiving, I ran my first 5 mile race and didn’t stop once.

And something in my head clicked that if I could learn to run 200 meters and I could learn to run 5 miles, I could, maybe, just maybe, actually learn to run a marathon.

In January of this year, I was offered the opportunity to run the NYC Marathon and raise money for the local autism non-profit, For Jake’s Sake. Armed with who I personally feel is one of the most gifted and amazing running coaches around, Michael Toomey, along with a fabulous running Club in Salem (Wicked Running Club) and the support of my family – I set out with 100% determination.

On November 6, 2011, I finished the NYC Marathon with not an ounce of pain, in a full on sprint for the last mile and my heart glowing out of my chest.

I don’t share this to brag but to tell anyone who doubts or believes they have what it takes to reach a physical goal that I am proof positive it goes far beyond physical ability.

It’s that sometimes - reaching your goals is 99.9% all about the strength of your heart.

I thank everyone at Eliza who showed such great support during this journey with me. Next up, I’m taking on the Boston Marathon on April 16!

Click here for our perspective on the event, including the themes that came through loud and clear for us this year: complexity, collaboration, and calls to action.

Pretty refreshing.

Yet there are also some very reputable sources of diet advice out there as well. Michelle Obama has replaced the Food Pyramid with the Food Plate. David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding’s concept of Eat This Not That seems to have some merit. And of course there are the myriad of apps one can download to a smart phone. Who should we listen to and what tools can we use to help us in making healthy eating choices?

I decided to test out my own eating habits with the smart phone app, Fooducate. It’s a nifty little tool that scans the bar code on food packaging and assigns a letter grade to the item. You can use it at the grocery store or to do a little cabinet clean out.

I began with my typical breakfast: non-fat Greek vanilla yogurt with strawberries, blueberries, Grapenuts and almonds - YUM! I was sure I was going to get an A++ for the start to my day and in fact I came close – I got an A minus.

Fooducate revealed the reason –my vanilla yogurt had a fair amount of sugar – and recommended plain yogurt instead. I wasn’t overly thrilled to make this change, but once I added in all the fixings the plain yogurt wasn’t too much of a sacrifice.

Now on to the snacks. Pretzels and reduced-fat peanut butter are staples of my mid-morning snack. I knew I was flirting with high fat content, but it’s the healthy kind, right? Well Fooducate was not happy with my snack choice. The pretzels were bad because they were made with refined flour instead of whole grain. The peanut butter contained fully hydrogenated oils and corn syrup. My grade: C+. At the suggestion of the app, I replaced the peanut with a natural variety that actually tastes pretty good.

The Fooducate app will not help you if you eat out or buy items without bar codes, but it is certainly a handy tool to evaluate packaged products. This is where tools like Michelle Obama’s  and Eat This Not That may come in handy.

We spend a lot of time at Eliza helping people make better decisions about their health, and realize that small changes really add up. From this perspective, Fooducate is onto something – get people in the habit of questioning their choices, and steer them towards better alternatives.

For me, tools like this are certainly helpful as guides. I will try the low fat/low salt/low sugar, etc. version of a product to see if there is a viable substitute for some of my faves. Low fat milk, non-fat Greek yogurt, low salt nuts and chips all get a thumbs up on my list.

As for cheese, ice cream, wine and chocolate - well there is just not a substitute for the real thing, so it’s up to me to apply my own rule – enjoy (almost) everything in moderation!

And while the analysis we perform on our outreach has a real business value – helping our clients better target and message their population based on what we learn – it’s also just fun to look at in wonderment.

Apparently, Forbes magazine feels the same way. Check out this great roundup of Eliza findings they posted, titled “Five Strange Things Americans Do with their Health.”

Ready to find out what kinds of strange or unexpected things are happening in your population (and more importantly, what you should do about it)?

Then we invited some incredible guest speakers to the stage to share how they’re addressing these issues in their own populations. Check out Marcus Osborne, Vice President, Healthcare Savings Programs and Global Sourcing at Walmart discuss his company’s concern about caregiving around the 19:10 mark; hear Charlotte Yeh, CMO of AARP describe how financial stress can be as much of a burden as a chronic disease at the 24:35 mark; and hear Wendy Lynch, Co-director of the Center for Consumer Choice in Health Care, Altarum Institute — and a co-developer of the Unmentionables data set – discuss job strain at the 31:15 mark.

We also introduced the concepts of “buffers” and “magnifiers” – the either positive or negative coping strategies people use to help deal with the stress in their lives, and the surprising impact of these buffers and magnifiers on overall health and productivity.

To share ideas on how to manipulate these buffers and magnifiers for good, we heard Ben Rubin, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Zeo show how they’re helping people get a better night’s sleep (at the 37:48 mark); Peter Levin, Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs shared his experiences helping returning service members better manage depression (at the 42:37 mark); Kyra Bobinet, Managing Director, Strategic Diversification at Aetna and Brent Poole, CEO of Mindbloom demo’ed their application designed to improve a person’s sense of community and spirituality (around the 49:30 mark); and David Wamsley, Co-Founder & CEO of GravityEight showed his application for bringing it all together at around the 54:46 mark.

Thanks to Health 2.0 for letting us bring this topic to the stage, to our guest presenters for putting these concepts in context, and to everyone in the audience – both that day and today – who are thinking about how we can collectively address these Unmentionables to improve health, wellbeing, and productivity for all.

Read more about the organization, its mission, and the people behind it here.

Interested? Join us!

“A growing movement of scientists and engineers is arguing that it’s time to rethink our assumptions about what an environment is, and to give our indoor environments the same scrutiny we give nature. When it comes to our individual lives, the indoor environment may be the one that matters the most: we in the developed world spend an average of 23 hours out of every day inside. Microbiologists are now teaming up with architects, engineers, and indoor air researchers to start to better understand the ecosystems that surround us every day, and whose contents are largely invisible to the eye.”

We had a bunch of reactions to this – including shuddering at the thought of how much time most of us are spending holed up inside. But there’s another interesting angle, which we believe also matters to those of us who are trying to improve people’s health and productivity.

Those who caught our presentation at this year’s Health 2.0 Conference heard us talk about the pull of life context on a person’s health and productivity levels.

Life context includes the things we call “The Unmentionables” – those issues like caring for an aging parent, financial concerns, or a stressful job — that put a drag on our personal lives yet aren’t necessarily things we traditionally think of as impacting our health.

The quality of our life context is also influenced by how we cope with the hand we are dealt – either positively (by having friends, or a sense of spirituality, for example) or negatively (say, having that extra glass of wine before bed).

Just as researchers are discovering that understanding indoor ecosystems is crucial to our health and the sustainability of our society, so are we challenging those of us in the health and productivity industry to consider the pull that life context can have.

Good health alone can’t protect you from feeling and performing badly; and simply having a bunch of traditional health ailments doesn’t mean you can’t compete with the best of them. You just need to have these issues in the right ratio.

As that article on indoor ecology points out, studying the ecology of our households could potentially bring systematic changes to the way we construct, clean, and maintain our indoor spaces – activities with health effects that we often only guess about.

It’s a great analogy for the work we’re doing (and the work we think you should be doing too, whether you’re an employer, a health plan, a consumer group, a physician, whomever), and a great rallying cry for the movement: Respect the Ecosystem.

Eager to practice his classroom skills, my son insisted on handwriting and hand delivering the Phineas & Ferb themed cards to his schoolmates, and mailing them to friends outside of school. I sent e-mails or Facebook message to the parents who like to enter events like this directly into their iphones, and called others who maybe check their emails once a week . And not surprisingly, we got RSVPs back in just as wide a range of mediums.

In short, it was a “surround sound” type of approach – the same kind of strategy (although way less complex and sophisticated) as the one that Eliza uses when developing communication plans for our clients.

Our experience has shown that it’s the right mix of mediums – with a message optimized for the population and timed just right – that increases engagement.

For health and wellbeing outreach, that typically means a mix of interactive automated phone calls, tailored emails, timely texts, and good old fashioned mail, while coordinating these messages for extra oompf (meaning, up to triple digit percent engagement rates).

As to whether it makes for a successful birthday party, I’ll have to let you know after the candles are all blown out.

Congratulations to Eliza’s own Ian Watters – pictured below – for finishing in the top 10 in his category at the recent “Mainiac” Triathalon. As you can see, he proudly wears Eliza’s hardcore bunny mascot on his shirt, underscoring our mantra: live hard, play hard, work hard – always with soul and finesse.

The tight pants are just gravy.

That means doing things like banning deep fried foods from church events, or organizing group walks around a nearby track. In short, it’s about tapping into the power of community.

If we have the luxury of getting face time with folks through community events, you better believe we leverage the heck out that opportunity. And if not, we’ve found that there are lots of other ways we can build a “surround sound” approach using the channels that we do have access to – such as phone, email, text.

Because turns out most people are receptive to hearing health messages that way. Throw our Business Intelligence inputs into the mix and we can get even closer to figuring out where, when, and how we can underscore our health messages – maybe even in a way that compels people to share their tips for healthier living with others.

For example, we recently did a program that yielded a bumper crop of great crowd-sourced advice on dealing with high blood pressure. It’s not necessarily the advice you’d see written in the fine print of the prescription bottle. And you may not hear it from your doctor.

But as this article demonstrates, when it comes to making lasting behavior change around health, it’s all about finding the influencers in life – whoever they may be.