The Quizzify Blog
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Articles 25–48 of 171
The 5 Best Ways to Waste Money in Healthcare
Yikes! The most careful analysis ever, done for Washington state, reveals that 38% of all heatlhcare spending is wasted. And that estimate is probably on the low side because it excludes things the actuaries doing that study don't even know about. Some of this waste can be avoided, by teaching employees to Just Say No to useless healthcare. Not with a noble approach like "When you spend [our] money inappropriately, it drives up everyone's healthcare cost." But rather by pointing out the potenti
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The Top 20 Easiest Ways to Change Employee Health Behavior (Part 1)
This is the first in a three-part seriesQuizzify changes behavior through knowledge, not willpower. The actual changes below are quite easy and often pleasant, once you know what to do. Study after study after study shows willpower-driven behavior change rarely sticks, so why not try knowledge-based behavior change, starting with the items below? 1. Replace nonfat yogurt with full-fat yogurtDairy fat may or may not be a good thing. More recent evidence suggests it is, for most people. But here’
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Americans are overdiagnosed, overtreated – and overdosed
With all the vendors, providers, and manufacturers urging us to get more medical care (always somehow “showing savings” in the process), isn’t it nice to know there is one vendor dedicated to putting guardrails around employees’ tendencies to overuse medical care? Read Quizzify's blog post by Al Lewis.
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How Quizzify May Have Saved My Life (Again)
You may be excused if you don't remember the first time Quizzify may have saved my life, thanks to one specific question:After my dentist did some extensive dental work, I was certain I had an abscess as a result. My dentist kept insisting I didn’t, but I kept writing and calling her insisting the opposite. The story is right here, and actually kinda funny, assuming you weren’t the one with the abscess. I would not have trolled my dentist absent this Quizzify question. I would have assumed she
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Quizzify's Unique GLP-1 Management Approach...in 500 Words
Never before has there been a combination of popularity and cost like GLP-1s have generated. Speaking of cost, here is our Weight Loss Drug Economics Calculator (WLDEC), where you can enter your own assumptions for utilization – and actually track those assumptions, starting with direct cost and the savings offset, all the way through to the impact on total comp costs and even profit margins.Before their journeyUsing WLDEC might lead you to conclude that, financially, you shouldn't cover weight
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Those "Nutrition Facts" Labels Are Mostly Wrong
Uncover the truth about nutrition labels! Most "Nutrition Facts" are misleading. Read this eye-opening post to decode the secrets behind the labels.
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The Perils of Precert for GLP-1s
Prior authorization (“precert”) can be a very useful tool to prevent excessive and inappropriate use of healthcare resources - whether surgeries, expensive diagnostics, or specialty meds...
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The Quizzify Financial Consent: Everything You Need to Know
Here's what the FDA Director, Dr. Marty Makary, had to say about the Quizzify Financial Consent:"Kudos for Quizzify for giving people this tool to fight these outrageous prices... Already, I’ve heard powerful stories of how these Quizzify “battlefield consent” forms have saved people thousands of dollars."These 18 Words Prevent High ER Bills From the days when employees had to actually write in the words. Or, more recently, affix a sticker with the 18 words written on them. Now, of course, the C
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New studies "prove" drinking causes 61 diseases and aspartame causes cancer
Two recent studies came out that are worth noting for the same reason: how bad they are.Last month’s study links even small quantities of alcohol (a minimum of one drink a week was termed “regular” drinking, which it isn’t) to 61 diseases, including 33 that had never been linked to alcohol before. Before you start teetotalling (and far be it from us to discourage that), consider a few things. First, literally tens of billions of people have been drinking hundreds of billions of ounces of alcoho
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Addressing the 3 Pitfalls of Weight Loss Drug Coverage
If you are like most benefits leaders, you are wrestling with the question of whether tocover the new generation of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss, or just for diabetes. By way ofbackground, Ozempic and Wegovy are the same drug (also known as semaglutides), but in different doses. Ozempic is FDA-approved for Type 2 diabetes but not treatment of obesity. Wegovy is the reverse. Mounjaro (tirzepatide) is only approved to treat diabetes now, but will likely be approved for weight loss soon. The "pitfal
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8 Things Employees Should Know about Splenda
No one has ever claimed that artificial sweeteners are a health food. The argument usually runs: “Well, they aren’t as bad as sugar.” Or are they? We aren’t going to “take sides” here generally, but rather just make 8 observations – 4 pro and 4 con – regarding the study just released that recommends not consuming Splenda, the brand name of sucralose. Let’s start with the arguments against Splenda.1. The study claims some very specific harms and risksTo quote a cogent summary of the study in Med
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The 4 "P's" Many Doctors Get Wrong
What do PTSD, pregnancy, postpartum, and prostates have in common, besides starting with P? Many doctors get them wrong. PTSDIn this case, it’s not generally the doctors who get it wrong, though some might. It’s that the official criteria for diagnosing it look like something out of the 1970s, when it was thought to be largely a condition of soldiers returned from Vietnam. There are eight criteria and you have to meet all of them to get the diagnosis. Otherwise, it’s quite possible that insuran
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Five things to teach employees about nutrition
As the vendor with the most accurate information about nutrition, we try to attack nutritional misinformation head-on. The added advantage of our Q&A format is that we can identify the biggest myths by looking at the number of incorrect answers to our questions. Here is our debunking of the five biggest myths in nutrition.
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ER prices rising fast!
There is a loophole in the No Surprises Act: it doesn’t cover facility fees. A “facility fee” is an upcharge that hospitals tack onto itemized ER bills. There are two competing explanations for these fees. Read Al Lewis blog post here!
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Quizzify Surpasses Minimum Acceptable Amazingness to Achieve Even More Amazingness
Earlier this month we announced that we had achieved Minimum Acceptable Amazingness. The reason? Our Doctor Visit PrepKits, a unique self-navigation tool for 191 easily searchable common reasons to visit the doctor, from acne to zoster. (Actually it’s “from abdominal pain to zoster,” but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)Even. More. Amazingness.The PrepKits now also include links to full information about drugs that might be prescribed for that specific condition. This includes not only
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New Quizzify2Go Release Achieves Minimum Acceptable Amazingness
This is Part One of the posting covering our new release. Part Two, upgrading the vaunted Quizzify2Go ER Sticker Shock Prevent Consent, will be posted Feb 28. There are some fine navigation vendors that navigate specialist referrals, find the best venues for tests and procedures, manage postacute cases in a timely manner, help employees use their benefits, and generally walk people needing high-intensity assistance or considering elective surgery through the maze that is US healthcare.But what a
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Quizzify Introduces Next-Generation Health Risk Assessment
Quizzify now offers a Health Risk Assessment (HRA) that addresses a much wider range of health risks than current HRAs, and by doing so, re-energizes an increasingly irrelevant self-assessment process (while guaranteeing compliance with any 2019 EEOC rule changes).
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Health Disparities Hidden in Your Benefits Plan
The thesis of this webinar was to show that, notwithstanding your best efforts, you have more health disparities that you would expect...but that, notwithstanding these preconceptions in the poll results, closing them can actually save money. Read more and sign up here!
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Who says employee behavior change is hard? Here are 20 easy ones.
This is the third in a three-part series, but you don't have to link to the others. Everything is here in one place.Quizzify changes behavior through knowledge, not willpower. The actual changes below are quite easy and often pleasant, once you know what to do. Study after study after study shows willpower-driven behavior change rarely sticks, so why not try knowledge-based behavior change, starting with the items below? 1. Replace nonfat yogurt with full-fat yogurtDairy fat may or may not be a
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Is the latest colonoscopy conclusion “too hot for Quizzify”? (Part Two)
This is, um, Number 2 in our two-part series. Part One is here. At the end of Part One,we promised:Tune in tomorrow, when we will conclude with:1. Three observations that seem to have eluded everyone commenting on NORDiCC2. Five recommendations for employers based on the data and the rebuttals, and3. Three misinformed objections to this NORDiCC study.Observation #1: This conclusion does not account for the costs.Screening 455 people to find 1 case of colon cancer (that, according to the all-caus
Read articleIs the latest colonoscopy conclusion “too hot for Quizzify”? (Part One)
This is the first in a two-part series...Normally this blog doesn’t tackle controversies. Hence, as Alert Reader Owen Muir put it, this topic could be too hot for Quizzify. Nonetheless, here we go...Last Friday a study called NORDiCC was published in the New England Journal of Medicine refuting everything we thought we knew about colonoscopies (except for the parts we wish we didn’t know). This was a well-designed study (called a "Gold Standard" by STATNews, a publication which whose conclusion
Read articleThe "Top 20" easiest employee behavior changes: Parts 1 and 2
These are the combined first two parts of our 3-part series. If you read the first part last month, you can skip to #7. Quizzify changes behavior through knowledge, not willpower. The actual changes below are quite easy and often pleasant, once you know what to do. Study after study after study shows willpower-behavior change doesn't work, so why not try knowledge-based behavior change, starting with the items below? 1. Substitute full-fat yogurt for nonfatDairy fat may or may not be a good thin
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Bringing your dental benefit into the 21st century
When was the last time you revamped your dental benefit? When was the last time you even gave it a second thought? And here’s why no one does: the annual maximum dollar limit for dental is typically lower than the annual deductible for medical. Hence, you don’t spend much money on dental, even if your employees do. Read more of Al Lewis' blog post here.
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Great news! I got a cavity.
I’m probably the only person ever to be happy to be told they have a cavity. The reason? Quizzify has been advocating for Silver Diamine Fluoride (SDF) treatment of cavities for 5 years. And recently I got a chance to try it. My current dentist, unlike my previous one, went along with my idea readily. Dentists will usually go along with the SDF proposal from the patient. Rarely will they actively recommend it, due to the much lower pricing, which you'll see momentarily. And that's exactly what
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