Employee Health Tracking: The Pros and Cons of Wearables

With nearly a third of Americans using a wearable device to track their daily health and fitness, forward-thinking organizations are looking to tap into this trend to not only increase worker well-being, but to control healthcare and insurance costs.

BP America introduced one of the first health tracking programs in 2013 by strapping FitBit step counters to workers to encourage healthier behaviors within its workforce. While the novelty of people wearing a tracker to monitor their health and activity has worn off, incentives play a vital role in enticing employees to participate in employer-sponsored tracker programs.

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Health Trackers for Employees: What You Need to Consider

Workers who wear the devices and log a certain amount of physical activity in a given time period can, for instance, receive insurance discounts (providers such as UnitedHealth Group, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna and Aetna offer such “rewards” as part of their coverage arrangements).

UnitedHealthcare’s rewards program, which launched in 2023, encourages eligible members — including their spouses — to use wearable devices to earn up to $1,000 each per year. To do so, they must complete various daily health goals and one-time activities, such as taking 5,000 steps in a day, 15 minutes or more of activity per day, or tracking their sleep patterns for 14 nights.

“The ability to track exercise and activity habits is now a common feature of a lot of the well-being platforms,” said Steven Noeldner, the well-being vertical leader at Mercer. “And, it’s certainly popular among our clients that have well-being initiatives in place.”

With data showing the global number of users in the “smart bands” segment of the digital health market will increase by nearly 127 million users over the next five years, it is a benefit employers should monitor if they want to encourage wellness in and out of work.

Who’s Buying the Device?

Thanks to the ubiquity of current technology, many employees may already be wearing a motion-tracking device on their wrist or in the form of a smartphone. But a large portion of these users may still need to purchase some sort of wearable device to begin any new health tracking program.

“In today’s world, it’s relatively rare for organizations to just pay for them and give them out,” Noeldner said.

Instead, employers will often offer an allowance or refund for the purchase of a device, as many well-being vendors offer a subsidy arrangement with the major device manufacturers to offer bulk-shipping rates for organizations.

“Some vendors even have ‘purchase by earning’ programs,” Noeldner said, “where participants can get a rebate on the device by using it and crossing different thresholds of daily steps or movement accomplished.”

Tracking Pitfalls

Regardless of whether an organization simply utilizes a well-being provider’s existing platform or creates its own internal program to encourage healthy behaviors, when it comes to all the terabytes of private health data created by health tracking programs, privacy concerns quickly become paramount for users.

According to Noeldner, to counteract this threat, most — if not all — of the major health tracking platforms employ outside help to safely handle the reams of biometric data, steps counts and weight-loss information created by participants.

“A third-party data aggregator takes the data from a variety of different devices, strips it of any identifying markers and then provides a single data feed to the well-being vendor to share with a client organization,” Noeldner said.

But what happens to all that data after a participating employee leaves the organization?

“What we see is that there’s usually a standard period, around 60 days after the termination, before the data is destroyed or erased,” Noeldner said. “The data does not linger.”

But even if it did, employers that sought to sell any accumulated health data they reaped from these programs would be likely to run into several legal barriers.

Given the current protections around privacy laws (including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the U.S. or the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union), selling any employee health data to a third party is inadvisable, Oran Kiazim, senior data protection advisor at international law firm Bird & Bird, told the BBC.

“An employer doing so would run the risk of civil claims, where compensation across a data class could be costly, on top of the potential damage to reputation or brand value,” Kiazim said. “In certain circumstances, there can even be criminal liability.”

A Shift in Thinking

To reap the full benefits of any health tracking program, however, experts encouraged organizations to broaden the definition of wellness beyond just physical health to also include emotional, social and financial wellness, among others.

While a spike in blood pressure or a dip in daily steps can tell a compelling story, those data points can also uncover hidden insights if viewed correctly, shared James Graves, Korn Ferry’s global leader of CEO and enterprise leadership development.

“We need to shift our thinking and take seriously that health KPIs [key performance indicators] being off creates risks for poor decisions, poor interactions, and wear and tear on leaders,” he said.

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