Evaluation Summary 

Narrative Description of Evaluation Results

Evaluation in the Dow Health Promotion program is part of a complete process of measurement based program management (see diagram). The approach to evaluation includes staff education, protocol development and most importantly the maintenance of an accurate, well-designed, easily queried common data system which is used to record every interaction where a participant can be identified.

Evaluation efforts appropriately balance the need for outcome data with the cost and staff time to accomplish them and minimize intrusive burden on participants. In this regard, Dow has chosen to collect minimal new information directly in the health promotion effort and to access/merge with existing data sets to obtain necessary information for studies. Recently, multiple existing data bases were merged to allow a large scale, low cost, six year longitudinal cohort study designed to characterize participants in Dow sponsored health promotion programs and determine associations between participation and health status changes as well as health care claims costs. This study of 11,496 employees substantiated that preventive health initiatives are producing statistically significant health improvements and are highly valued by the employees. An association between participation and lower health care claims was also identified. Other internal studies included describe examples of health issues studied over the last few years.