Tanner Health System is trying to lead by example when it comes to encouraging more exercise in west Georgia, and analytics collected from the organization’s first ever employee “Fitbit challenge” show employees logged more than 460 million steps and 920,000 “very active minutes” in the weeks since receiving the devices.
In the fall, Tanner launched its Well for Life initiative, seeking to help employees become healthier individuals as the health system continues to focus more on wellness and prevention efforts. During the kickoff, Tanner distributed almost 1,800 Fitbit fitness tracking devices to employees throughout the organization.
Then, Tanner issued a challenge: use them.
“The results have been very impressive,” said Griffin Reynolds (pictured, far right), a certified health education specialist and wellness coordinator for Tanner who helped oversee the Fitbit program. “These devices are letting people see how active they really are, and how many calories they’re actually burning each day. They’re not keeping up with how many steps you think you took or how much exercise you think you got, but how well you actually did. For a lot of people, that can be an eye-opener.”
The devices log steps, track when a person is exerting himself or herself, and even monitor the duration and quality of sleep. The health system provided the devices as a way to educate employees about their health and motivate them to become more active.
Tanner’s Well for Life program launched a Fitbit challenge along with distributing the devices. Employees competed individually and as part of a team to see who could log the highest average daily steps and the highest daily average of “active minutes,” which is when the device detects the body is exerting itself, picking up on cues like metabolic equivalents, or METs, and device tracking speed.
Pamela Downs (pictured, second from left), who works in the laboratory at Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton, earned the “highest average daily steps,” with an average daily step count of 48,658. Michael Collins (pictured, middle), who works in environmental services for the health system, had the most “very active daily minutes,” averaging 266 minutes per day. Also pictured are Christina Schoerner, MS, RDN, LDN, a registered dietitian nutritionist and health coach for Tanner (far left) and Tanner Health System President and CEO Loy Howard (fourth from the left).
“To put that in perspective, most primary care providers want people to achieve about 10,000 steps a day and about 30 very active minutes,” said Griffin. “So these employees really blew that out of the water.”
“For the past five years, we’ve been focused on changing the way our employees engage with their personal health,” said Howard. “Our wellness program has gone a long way toward helping Tanner achieve a healthier overall workforce. Interest in employee wellness also continues to increase along with our overall emphasis in community wellness programs.”
Along with a thinner, more fit workforce, Tanner has seen gains in employees’ average HDL, or “good,” cholesterol, which improved from 51.4 to 56.9 since 2010, and employees’ LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol, has declined 14 points, from 114.6 to 100.4. Improvement has also been seen in the tobacco usage metric of the organization, with the number of employees using tobacco dropping from 9 percent to just 4 percent, and continuing to decline.
“This has been an exciting challenge for our team,” said Howard. “If you total the number of steps we took as an organization over these past six weeks, we could have walked from Carrollton to Seattle, Wash., and back again 37 times. That’s huge.”
Tanner’s Well for Life program doesn’t intend to rest on its laurels, though — another Fitbit challenge for the organization’s 2,800 employees is already underway.