Health literacy, healthcare hacks & how to spend less on care
171 articles on helping employees use healthcare wisely — from surprise bills to GLP-1s to the ROI math behind it all.
Now is the summer of our ticks content
No matter how good or bad the summer season, there are still 6 things employees should know about ticks.
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Nine Things to Throw Out Now
Your home, particularly your kitchen, likely contains some hazards your employees may be unaware of. If you’re a guy, you should read all the way through to the last, which is the one most likely to cause, uh, shrinkage.Now that we have the attention of at least half of you, let’s get started on the listicle. SpongesEven with inflation, sponges are one of the world’s great bargains. You couldn’t design better incubators of bacteria (“holding more germs than a toilet seat”). Moistness, food part
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You can stuff that colonoscopy. Here's something better.
Ah, yes, the dreaded colonoscopy. The good news is that the guidelines for getting colonoscopy's have changed. Learn the new guidelines in Al Lewis' newest blog post.
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How to use your ER Consent
Your Consent in your “wallet” should pop up when you go to the ER. It has brief instructions on it. This is the longer version of the instructions.BackgroundCongress passed a law in 1986 called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA as it is known. It was a response to the common practice of ERs telling you to go elsewhere if they didn’t like your insurance or lack thereof.Many hospitals have used that law as an excuse to raise prices for emergency care, arguing: “We hav
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A Collection of ER Sticker Shock Prevent Consents
A few of our many users of the Prevent Consent have forwarded them to us. Here is a little collection. Most recent is Sunrise Hospital, HCA's largest. A patient (who wants her name used) got a bill for $27,000 for dehydration in Las Vegas causing a fall:The amount owed was her deductible, $6,234.53As Marshall Allen's book title says: "Never pay the first bill." Quizzify sent one letter and magically the second bill fell to an even $3000, not itemized:They are hoping we go away, and if weren't HC
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Anti-Alcohol Studies Will Never Be Validated
You’ve likely read all the hullabaloo about the dangers of any amount of alcohol, like: • No level of alcohol consumption is safe • No level is safe – not even one glass of red wine/day • Spread the word – no amount of alcohol is safeHere are five reasons why this conclusion is completely wrong and it is perfectly OK to enjoy seven ounces of alcohol a week. (Just not at the same time, please.)This blog post will show you why the Validation Institute is needed. While others disagreed with this r
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These 18 Words Prevent High ER Bills
****You can download the app with these words right into your phone and have them pop up when you go to the ER. Chances are you reached this blog from your home page quiz. This app can be reached right from your home page****"Superseding other consents, I consent to responsibility (including insurance) for up to 2 times Medicare if coded correctly."If you need care in an emergency room, do not sign the financial consent that the hospital or free-standing ER has put in front of you. (The electron
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More FAQs on the Quizzify AutoConsent
Picking up from the one-page summary, this QR code links to a typical letter we place on file with the hospital. Emails for the ERs and admissions departments are never listed, so we send these to whoever we find in our database. It is then up to that person to forward the email. If they don't and the ER claims they never saw it, that's on them. You can't make yourself uncontactable and then complain because you weren't contacted.Or, as they say in law school, you can't murder your parents and t
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Five reasons it's actually okay to drink
***Note that we are referring to 7 ounces/week or less. And not all consumed in the same sitting, please.***You’ve likely read all the hullabaloo about the dangers of any amount of alcohol, like: • No level of alcohol consumption is safe • No level is safe – not even one glass of red wine/day • Spread the word – no amount of alcohol is safeHere are five reasons why this conclusion is completely wrong.The study reaching these conclusions is crap (Part 1)It claims that drinking even small quantiti
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Stop Ignoring Your Dental Benefit
Yes, we know it doesn’t cost you much money because the annual dental cap (no pun intended)(but if we had, it would be a good one) is often lower than the annual medical deductible.But that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. Quite the contrary. If there is an entire profession devoted to one teeny-weeny body part that in total comprises about 0.04% of your total weight, it must be important, right? Perhaps those 200,000 dentists are onto something?We have a new major hazard of inadequate dental educ
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People Accuse Quizzify of a Lot of Things*
But being behind the times is not one of them.* Quite the opposite: we are usually far ahead of the conventional wisdom. The FDA just announced that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) does not increase the risk of breast cancer. Millions of women, including my wife, were denied access to, discouraged from, or failed to seek HRT because of this concern, expressed as a Black Box warning – the highest level of side effect/adverse event warning. (Without actually getting a prescription, I can't
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The Top 5 Ways to Keep Plastic out of Your Brain
We offer a full quiz on microplastics/nanoplastics and microparticles in general – and how to avoid some of them. Here are five sample things employees would learn.
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Six Reasons to Add Health Education to Your Employee Benefits, Part I
Would you give every employee an unlimited budget to spend however they like?No. of course not. But isn't that exactly what you do with healthcare? Give them a basically unlimited budget with no training?No matter how good and engaging your benefits are, and how well employees understand them (unlikely, but we've got your back there too), employees still need to be trained on how to use healthcare itself. That is the missing link. And this posting offers six good reasons that helping employees u
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The 9 Most Overrated Foods
We find at Quizzify that it is much easier to change employee behavior through knowledge rather than eat-more-vegetables lectures, and through specifics rather than useless generalities like "eat a healthy breakfast." Find out the 9 most overrated foods in Al Lewis latest blog post.
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Quizzify 1, Texas Health 0
Most of the time when an employee of a Quizzify customer writes in our ER Consent, the hospital accepts it, saving thousands on allowed charges. These days, the Quizzify AutoConsent means the employee doesn't even have to write anything in. We get the hospitals to consent in advance to our 2x Medicare offer.Rarely, a hospital will attempt to fight back when an employee uses the Consent. And that's when the fun begins. In the immortal words of the great philosopher Sherlock Holmes: "Come, Wats
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Podcast: Why Your ER Spend is Out of Control
We were very pleased to be featured in the employee health services sector's most popular and engaging podcast, Relentless Health Value.
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How the FDA lets food companies "poison" our kids
What you are about to read may upset you, especially if you are a parent of a child, who has no doubt consumed these things. The good news is that the incoming FDA director, Marty Makary MD, is now fully aware of this and is very concerned. Dr. Makary is a major Quizzi-fan!
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Ignore the New Negative Findings on Weight Loss Drugs
The newest findings reveal that there is not even a slight offset in reduced healthcare expense from weight loss drugs during the first two years of use.How should this change your weight loss drug strategy? Answer: not at all. For starters, an industry-financed study shows that there is a 10% reduction in all-cause hospital admissions. That works out to be about twice as high as the 20% reduction in heart attacks and strokes that our Weight Loss Drug Economics Calculator includes, based on th
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Six Things Employees Should Know about Antibiotics
Antibiotics are America’s most overused prescription non-opioid. Here’s what your employees should know about in our latest Quizzify blog from Al Lewis.
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The Glide Path to Controlling your GLP spend
We’ve been pitching employee education on weight loss drugs all year. Obviously we’re enjoying some success, or we wouldn’t keep doing it, right? Alas, “some success” does not mean “complete success.” Yet we should be enjoying complete success, because the ROI of “dissuading the GLP-curious and educating the GLP-serious” is obvious: • Most users – largely the GLP-curious – drop out after months of spending $3000+ of your dollars. • Our Before Your Journey quiz costs a tiny fraction of that…and y
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How to Dissuade the GLP-Curious and Educate the GLP-Serious
Dissuade the GLP-curious and educate the GLP-serious.Say that three times fast, because that’s the key to affordable coverage of weight control drugs. Here’s why: the majority of users discontinue the drugs within 6 months and almost two-thirds within 10 months. Those users consume a big chunk of your weight loss drug budget with nothing to show for it. Here are the stats, from the Blue Cross Association and Reuters:Most of these likely GLP-curious dropouts got their information from influencers
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Does Covering Weight-Loss Drugs Expose You to ERISA Liability?
The weight loss drugs are approved only as adjunct therapies to diet and exercise. If your organization is not requiring diet education, such as the type Quizzify provides or exercise monitoring, such as what US Preventive Medicine or Advanta provide, you are encouraging a use case that the FDA has specifically not approved.
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GLP-1s: The Experts "Weigh In"
Quizzify knew this before most people could even spell GLP-1s. We have created a 25-question Before Your Journey"quiz to combat the influencer- and ad-driven misinformation by testing people's knowledge of safety concerns. This quiz discourages those who would drop out anyway from even starting. You only pay for the quiz for people who take the quiz but don't then start on the drugs.
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6 Steps to Control the Use of Weight Loss Drugs
Magic bullet or not, never before in the history of healthcare has anything – any drug, procedure, test, anything – combined this much effectiveness, popularity…and cost. Indeed, this single class of drugs will likely add 10 basis points to the overall US inflation rate in 2024. (You heard it here first, folks.)
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