TechNO Expo

Tom Salonek
CEO, Intertech, St. Paul

Staywell, an employee health management firm in St. Paul, creates and hosts custom Web sites for individuals participating in company health programs. Staywell’s business clients want their employees to complete health assessments to increase awareness of health issues. Incentive programs reward employees for participation in the surveys. Staywell had created a system to track incentives, but this first version lacked an intuitive interface.

Intertech worked with Staywell staff to design and develop a new system. Staywell’s internal needs—accessing and setting up new incentive programs—were fairly straightforward. However, the external needs for Staywell’s clients were less so.

Individual participants needed to be able to see how far along they were toward reaching a health goal and when they could expect their reward, such as a gift certificate or an insurance premium discount.

When a participant completes a health assessment, it can come in on paper or it can be completed on line. When participants check their progress on line, they are looking at a different database than where the progress is actually tracked. That real information is in a database in St. Paul, but when a participant checks whether they got points for completing an assessment, they are looking at information from a database in Salt Lake City, Utah. The job of keeping these two databases in sync fell to custom applications we wrote to do the job.

In some cases, however, points were missed or incorrectly awarded when employment or marital status for a given participant changed. An appeals system was created to allow Staywell helpline staff to initiate a request for points on completion of a given event. Now, Staywell has taken over the support, training, and monitoring of the programs.