Tampa General Hospital is one of the largest hospitals in Florida, employing more than 8,000 team members and serving more than a half million patients per year. In March 2022, TGH launched Diet ID as an employee wellness offering through the wellbeing platform Virgin Pulse.
Tampa General employee wellness leaders chose Diet ID primarily because of its scalability in large populations. This solution has solved a major pain point in their wellness programming: it is impossible to reach and engage the entire population with its limited nutrition classes and similar programs.
“Diet ID provided a quick and easy way to assess the population’s diet quality and provide them with education,” their team told us.
Diet ID is integrated through Virgin Pulse, a comprehensive health and wellbeing platform accessible to all TGH team members and physicians. The platform offers incentives via points (”Pulse Points”) that can be redeemed for gift cards, merchandise, charitable donations, and other goodies. Team members were introduced to Virgin Pulse via a mass communication strategy for the launch, including email, paper mail, webinars, wellness champion meetings, and a one-time Pulse Cash incentive for registering.
Once team members were established on Virgin Pulse, they were introduced to Diet ID’s Nutrition Wellbeing Platform via multi-channel communications — including a bi-weekly newsletter for team members, a Diet ID-specific email to the entire organization, and wellness champion meetings — as well as a one-time Pulse Cash incentive for registering. To maintain healthy eating behaviors and engagement with the Diet ID platform, team members are encouraged to earn additional Pulse Points by engaging in monthly Diet ID activities, challenges, and events.
These efforts resulted in an activation rate that surpassed their goals — over 25% in just 6 weeks (goal was 25% in one year!). Furthermore, the data show a high completion rate — 97%. Over the first five months, over 2000 TGH team members took the Diet ID assessment, and among those, over half are actively participating in the Daily Actions (Challenges) module. Receiving top-down support from leadership, Tampa General’s wellness department feels it is important to include completion rate and other Diet ID-related KPIs because “we recognize the importance of diet quality for our team members. Including Diet ID completion rate in our departmental goals keeps us accountable and helps us develop strategies to market.”
Diet ID’s rich, detailed data reports help drive interventions and programming for the population. For example, the Flexitarian eating pattern is a popular goal, so programming can focus on related cooking classes, recipes and nutrient shifts that are consistent with that goal.
Data thus far suggests that Tampa General team members who engage in the Diet ID platform have improved diet quality and higher nutrition literacy. They also make better, more informed food choices at every meal.
