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Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index
Partnering to Improve Well-Being
In a historic collaboration for American health transformation, Gallup and Healthways are providing a new national daily pulse of individual and collective health and well-being, as well as solutions for a healthier America.
On January 2, 2008, Gallup and Healthways formed an unprecedented 25-year partnership merging decades of clinical research and development expertise, health leadership and behavioral economics to understand the key factors that drive well-being. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is the result of both companies' commitment to transform healthcare by advancing the world's understanding of well-being and its impact on our lives.
The Gallup-Healthways collaboration draws on diverse backgrounds and achievements of individuals that include published researchers and scientists specializing in employee engagement as well as industrial and organizational psychology; a Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences whose research pioneered behavioral economics; leaders specializing in the discipline of health and care support interventions; and the inventor of an economic model that establishes a direct correlation between human nature in the workplace, employee engagement and business outcomes.
About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index provides a comprehensive, real-time view of the public's well-being in the United States, giving governments, health plans, employers and communities' unmatched insight into the health and prosperity of their populations. The Well-Being Index is today's "voice of the people" and the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to measure what it is that people believe constitutes a good life, who is feeling good about life, and who is in need of a helping hand.
With the goal of providing the world's most up-to-date measure of individual and collective health and well-being, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks the well-being of U.S. residents 350 days out of the year interviewing no fewer than 1,000 adults nationwide each day.
The research and methodology underlying the Well-Being Index is based on the World Health Organization definition of health as "not only the absence of infirmity and disease, but also a state of physical, mental, and social well-being."
The Well-Being Index is comprised of over 40 questions providing an overall composite metric based on six individual and interrelated domains and indices of well-being: Life Evaluation, Emotional Health, Physical Health, Healthy Behavior, Work Environment and Basic Access.
What is the Healthways Well-Being Survey and how does it differ
from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index?
The 1,000 completed daily Community Surveys are administered telephonically by Gallup on a national level to generate the data for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The state, city, Congressional District and community findings help organizations and policy makers better understand health and well-being at a macro level to improve it.
Administered at an organizational level, the Healthways Well-Being Survey includes all of the questions from the Community survey with additional questions around employee productivity, work environment and engagement, organizational support of healthy lifestyle choices, and their impact to business performance. It contains a deeper analysis of health risks and status with the inclusion of an NCQA accredited health risk assessment (HRA) and optional biometrics capability. Through the delivery of individual and organizational reports, findings from the Healthways Well-Being Survey are benchmarked and compared with the national measures in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (Community Survey).
What is the benefit of implementing the Healthways Well-Being Survey?
- It gives employers a comprehensive view of their employees' social, emotional, physical and financial well-being so that they can understand how to target human capital related investments that best support those needs.
- It assesses the real quality of a work environment including its stressors, leadership culture, wellness and prevention programs, and recruitment and retention efforts to determine exactly where improvements are needed for a more engaged and productive workforce.
- It can benchmark an employer nationally, regionally and locally, by job or location, and guides the development of custom solutions for their unique workforce to provide a more supportive work environment and earn recognition as an employer of choice.
- It helps employers understand the health conditions of their workforce and how to support them for optimal productivity and presenteeism.
- By learning what the significant contributors are to their direct medical costs, whether companywide or location specific, the employer can design and target better ways to address root causes and save money on medical costs.
- It measures the human performance of organizations' well-being through one of the largest behavioral economic databases ever created. Through this empirical, scientific data, organizations can demonstrate best in class performance against the rest of the nation to drive new solutions.
- Going well beyond the traditional health risk assessment (HRA), the Well-Being Survey is the only measure that provides a complete view of individual and collective well-being by pinpointing drivers at work and home and how they interrelate. While an HRA covers only a snapshot in time as a means for measuring and improving health, the Well-Being Index is a dynamic metric that offers the ability to segment, trend and benchmark a population at any point in time over any defined time period.