EP331: Employers Buyer Beware! Six Tricks Wellness and Point-solution Vendors Use to Overstate Their Results, With Al Lewis, Cofounder and CEO of Quizzify

In Episode 331, Stacey Richter talks with Al Lewis, cofounder and CEO of Quizzify and founder of the Validation Institute, about six logical fallacies and computational tricks that wellness and point-solution vendors use to overstate their results — and why employers are worse than ever at evaluating these vendors.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ Why employers are increasingly reliant on brokers and EBCs who may be taking money from the very vendors they recommend

✅ The six tricks vendors use to overstate cost savings: regression to the mean, participant vs. nonparticipant comparisons, trend inflation, plausibility testing, actuarial validation, and overstated engagement

✅ Why wellness done "for" employees works better than wellness done "to" employees

✅ Why actuaries can be easily corrupted, and what the Validation Institute does about it

✅ What questions employers should be asking their vendors and their brokers

WHY THIS MATTERS

With a flood of private equity dollars pouring into point solutions, employer customers are worse than ever at evaluating wellness and point-solution vendors — partly because so many backroom broker deals happen without employers ever knowing there's a vig involved. Buyer beware, and get a broker who's committed in writing to not taking payola from the vendors they recommend.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

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=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

✭ LinkedIn ✭ Threads ✭ Bluesky ✭ X

00:00 Introduction.

04:49 Are brokers going to have to become more transparent about where their money is coming from?

07:33 Are carriers transparent?

08:09 What's the goal of the Validation Institute?

08:55 "You either get a true statement put up or learn what you have to do in order to get a true statement put up."

11:18 How is Regression to the Mean (RTM) used in a flawed way?

16:32 "If you do wellness for employees instead of to employees, the people who want the wellness will be able to access it."

21:13 What is plausibility testing?

23:17 What about actuaries and validation?

23:40 "That's one of the reasons the Validation Institute exists, is because actuaries are easily corrupted."

25:18 What is a prime example of population health economics?

26:20 What does it mean to overstate engagement?

27:15 "How often did you use this and was it useful?"

28:55 "Are you validated by the Validation Institute, and if not, why not?"