Can an insurance company motivate people to exercise?

Short answer? Not very well.

My health insurance company has a program called "blue points" which is supposed to motivate me and my co-workers to exercise.  It’s a great idea – very poorly applied.  Yet another example of the "what " and the "how" being too far apart from each other.  

Senior Executive:  "Hey – let’s motivate people to exercise more – by giving them free stuff if they exercise – let’s develop a program that lets them log they activity.  When they log activities – we give them points .. and at the end of the year – they can cash in the points for free stuff." 

Development project manager: "OK .. we’ll make a website that they can use to log in and log their points"

But they missed the part where they think carefully about the user experience.  Primary goal: encourage exercise.  So we want to enable the application to capture the fact that exercise happened in a manner that is very easy for the end-user.  Core principle:  meet the user where they live – don’t make the user jump through too many hoops to achieve the goal.

I exercise often.  As often as I should?  No – but at least three days a week – and usually more.  In the past year – I ran two half-marathons, one full marathon, and several shorter races.  Training for all of this required that I run as much as 40 miles/week.  So I should have plenty of "blue points" – right?  well .. no – because I would rather spend my valuable time exercising rather than logging my exercise.

Let’s see what it takes to log exercise with Blue Points.

Log in to the Blue Cross website:

9:26  AM – find the Blue Points link:

9:27   .. ahh here it is .. 

Next screen … 

New window … logged in .. pick an activity .. 

9:28   … log my activity .. 

9:29  … type type .. click .. 

Check the log to make sure it was saved.

9:30.

Total time = 4 minutes.  Not much, you say?  What if I was exercising instead of sitting on my butt during these 4 minutes!

so .. five days a week (optimal case .. bear with me) .. exercise for 4 minutes  .. = 20 minutes of exercise.. for 50 weeks .. = ~ 15,000 calories I’d spend over a year .. if I didn’t have to navigate this maze of a website every time.

Is there an alternative?

Of course. I can think of a handful ? But I won’t lead the witness. Click here and let me know what you think is a better way. I’ll add some of the best of our ideas to mine in a follow-up post. We’ll then see if we can get their attention and get this implemented. J ..