by Ashley Thurow

Monument Health is excited to announce our recent purchase of Good Life Wellness Solutions, a workplace wellness platform created to cultivate and support a healthy workforce. When the opportunity presented itself, it was an obvious fit for Monument Health because Good Life Wellness Solutions’ work aligns perfectly with our work and mission.

Good Life Wellness Solutions is a vibrant company that has served thousands of employees through companies large and small across the U.S. for the past five years. Many companies supported through this platform are headquartered here in western Colorado such as the Roaring Fork Transit Authority, Hilltop Community Resources, and Feather Petroleum— companies we are excited to support without disruption as we grow.

Here’s why we are a perfect fit: Monument Health is a clinically integrated network whose mission is to improve the cost, quality, and experience of healthcare across western Colorado and beyond.  We work closely with insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and employer groups to promote preventive care and wellness activities that contribute to better health outcomes.

We know that a small percentage— around 20 to 30 percent—of health outcomes are determined by one’s interaction with the healthcare system.  For most of us, nearly 80 percent of our health is determined by other factors that occur while we live our lives outside of the doctor’s office.  And for those of us who are active in the workforce, about a quarter of our lives are spent at work.  The impact our work environment has on our health cannot be understated— a fact that our employer-partners know all too well.

Our work with employers is truly special to us because we are so closely aligned in a desire to help employees thrive.  Ultimately, wellness in the workplace comes down to culture.  How we interact with and support one another, show up for one another, and the environment we foster makes all the difference in individual health and workplace success.  Our Good Life solution provides a platform to encourage and incentivize employees to enhance that positive workplace environment in order to live healthier lives.

A healthy workforce translates into a thriving workplace; a thriving workplace contributes to healthy communities; healthy communities are made up of healthy people. Healthy people place less demand on the healthcare system helping reduce the overall cost of care, which results in more affordable healthcare for individuals and employers alike.

Healthy people and affordable healthcare are at the heart of Monument Health’s work, which is more commonly referred to as population health services or “Pop Health.” Pop Health involves different proactive approaches, but it results in the same outcome—health with a focus on prevention.

Pop Health may look like a care coordinator calling you after you’ve been discharged from the ER to ensure you understand your prescriptions, have all of your questions answered and are on track for a successful recovery. It can be a friendly phone call to connect you with a primary care provider because a relationship with a provider is proven to result in fewer unnecessary hospital visits—visits known to cost the most. It may be a warm handoff to connect you with a provider’s office to help schedule an overdue or upcoming screening. It may look like your employer encouraging you to engage with a wellness platform to support and cultivate a healthy workforce.

Prevention is key, but so is practicality.

The GoodLife platform is not a high-dollar platform that requires employees to change their lives to meet new, unrealistic goals. It’s focused on practically meeting employees where they are at and bringing fun interactive wellness activities, goals, and rewards to them from their employer.

GoodLife Wellness Solutions is not intended to solve wellness for employers. Instead, it acts as a facilitator for a workplace that desires to focus on wellness by building a culture of wellness.  GoodLife provides connections between employees that help make a difference in their lives by incentivizing healthy habits.

Rebecca Weitzel, who co-founded the GoodLife platform in 2017, puts it this way: “Rather than pushing people to engage multiple times per day with the technology, we encourage them to engage with each other. Rather than enticing people to spend more time clicking and scrolling through screens to boost product usage, we hope they’ll spend more time chopping and mixing in their kitchens to boost their nutrition. And instead of forcing people to adapt their lives to this platform and the programs we created in it, we seek to adapt our programs to their lives.”

Because the platform is not out of reach and offers tangible, simple ideas to support whole-person health, it has grown and seen overwhelming success. Monument Health is excited to bring this strong, thriving platform under our banner, continue to support employers that currently use it, and begin to reimagine how this tool can be enhanced to bring even more value to employers and employees alike.

Monument Health is proud of the work we do to help individuals, communities and now employees live healthy lives. Good Life Wellness Solutions is an exciting addition to our growing services and the important work we do powering healthier communities across western Colorado.

Ashley Thurow
Executive Director, Monument Health

To learn more about Good Life Solutions’ workplace wellness portal powered by Monument Health visit: https://monumenthealth.net/good-life-wellness-solutions/