USAA Points the Way with Online Health Incentives
September 03, 2008
By Nathan Adkisson
The United Services Automobile Association has recently implemented an online program that organizes and provides personalized work-life resources for its more than 20,000 employees.
San Antonio-based USAA, a Fortune 200 company that provides insurance, investing services, and other financial advice to those who have served in the US military, recently unveiled their Personal Balance Tool (PBT).
USAA collaborated with Harris, Rothenberg International, a performance management company, and ValueOptions, USAA's in-house healthcare provider, to develop the PBT, an online system to help employees manage both at-home and at-work responsibilities.
The tool is organized around three online portals: "Today I'm feeling…", "My Self Assessments," and "My Life." To use the tool, an employee chooses a portal and then either identifies a feeling, such as "stress," or a life event, such as "divorce" or "buying a home."
"The issue [USAA] were dealing with, which is not unlike what many companies go through, was how to connect employees to what's out there," says Rich Paul, vice president of Health and Performance Solutions for ValueOptions. "They wanted them to be able to use very specific resources to maximize the use of benefits available."
USAA and ValueOptions proposed the idea for the tool, while Harris, Rothenberg managed the technology for the project. The current version of the tool offers hundreds of pages of information and action plans from a variety of sources.
"If an employess is stressed, the tool might lead to the Employee Assistance Program from ValueOptions or an article about stress on another Web site," Paul says.
The most difficult part of creating the tool was collecting and organizing all the data in USAA's possession.
"The challenge was the level of detail needed with respect to capturing all the available resources," Paul says. "We spent a lot of time filtering what was available into a technological perspective."
It was important to the creators that the tool be tailored to what USAA employees themselves said they wanted to use.
"It had to be user-friendly and meaningful," says Dr. Edward Trieber, the managing director of Harris, Rothenberg. "USAA had a usability group that helped all along the way. They took each version and gave us feedback."
They quickly discovered that brevity and easy access were the most important characteristics of a successful tool. To achieve this, they embedded the tool on ValueOptions' main "Achieve Solutions" website.
"We learned that they wanted three clicks to get to an assessment, and that each assessment would have no more than 10 questions," Trieber says. "We wanted it to have not just a nice Web face but to get the important information, names, and phone numbers."
Dr. Jo Renee Fine, director of training and content development for Harris, Rothenberg, says that because of the constant feedback they received while developing the tool, they knew it would be what the employees wanted.
"People love to find out more about themselves," Fine says. "We didn't want to overload them, just provide enough information specific to each person for them to go forward."
Fine and Trieber say use of the tool has surpassed expectations and will continue to grow as it is updated.
"All this information on the Internet is like a library," Trieber says. "People get confused and don’t always want to use the library. This tool is like the librarian."
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