Creating the Future of Employee Wellness with Data-Driven Insights
by Mahesh Salem, Vice President, Information Management & Analytics at Viverae
I got into the health space because it’s where I felt I could have the most impact. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama, people spend half their lives trying to gain as much wealth as possible. Then, those same people spend the next half of their lives burning through that wealth in order to get their health back.
This has never made much sense to me, but it’s a problem I see rear its ugly head time and again. I notice this during the personal moments I spend involved in yoga and meditation, but it’s especially true in my career as an enterprise data management professional for Viverae.
I’ve always been very passionate about health and wellness. Working in this field, you feel like you make a real difference in people’s lives. You can see your impact on the world — the way one small decision you’ve made today grows and evolves into meaningful change tomorrow, next week, or even a year from now. You don’t always affect a large group of people. Sometimes, it’s just one person. But at the end of the day, that’s more than enough.
Becoming the Catalyst for Positive Change
The biggest reason I joined Viverae was to enact positive change in the world around me. At Viverae, our wellness solutions help employees manage their health while also assisting companies in creating a culture of well-being. Employers partner with us because healthy employees tend to also be passionate and productive employees.
Prior to joining Viverae, I was in consulting for around fifteen years. Most of the businesses I worked with were large companies with complex ecosystems in terms of data and analytics. I was happy with my job, but at the same time, I hoped to work at an organization where I could see the impact of my work. I also wanted to get more into healthcare. My role as Vice President, Information Management & Analytics at Viverae is a perfect fit.
Showing Value Today
Every kilobyte of data that goes in and out of Viverae first flows through my team and I. How Viverae stores this data, how we transform it into analytics, reports, and business intelligence — we’re responsible for all of it.
Customers don’t want you to sell them a service; they want you to sell them results.
For the last several years, we’ve focused most of our efforts on showing clients the true value of what we do. When you’re dealing with data in the way we are, you tend to see a lot of people’s eyes start to glaze over when you talk about it. People don’t want to hear about technical specifications or data points. They don’t want you to sell them a service; they want you to sell them results.
To shed a little light on things, think about the situation in terms of medical costs. Medical costs are increasing every day, and there’s not much anyone can do to directly contain that. In order to sell our service, we have to focus on how we can help a business address this problem. We can’t make medical costs cheaper, but we can reduce the number of sick days employees need. We can cut down on the number of people who need to go to the emergency room. We help improve employee health and well-being, which improves productivity. These are the goals we’ve set our sights on.
I have a Health Management Analytics team that does all the analysis for our organization. We present the results we find to both clients and account managers to help forge better and more effective client relationships.
The problem is often that turning insight into action and then results is a process that happens gradually — or at least, far slower than most people would like. At Viverae, we’ve found that the changes we initially institute will take around three years to yield tangible results. Developing cultures of well-being is a process, a worthwhile one. But demonstrating value with that timetable is difficult. We need to show our clients results faster. Luckily, we have a tool to help us do that: Qlik.
Diving Beneath the 1s and 0s
I was already familiar with Qlik thanks to the time I spent working with another company who partnered with Qlik. At Viverae, we had tried a number of business intelligence solutions that proved to be ineffective. Once I had made a case for Qlik Sense, we rolled the platform out to our internal analysts.
Previously, we would generate a general report that detailed a client’s annual results. Our customers would repeatedly come back with questions about their data. We realized they wanted us to go deeper, which meant we would have to go back, create new reports, and perform more analysis — all of which was incredibly time-consuming. It was also a non-value add for my team because all we were doing was applying a filter or changing the way we visualized data in some way. We were putting a new coat of paint on the same data and handing it back to our clients. Every time they had another question, we would have to start from scratch…
Read the full story here.
