Be Colorado health screenings see healthy increase in participation

E. Jill Pollock, vice president of Employee and Information Services and chair of the University of Colorado Health and Welfare Trust, with two of the electric-assisted bikes won by employees.

Be Colorado held 17 health screenings across the university in October and early November, with 1,844 participants, a 50 percent increase in participation over last year. The screenings provided participants important baseline biometric health information in a convenient and confidential way.

E. Jill Pollock, vice president of Employee and Information Services and chair of the University of Colorado Health and Welfare Trust (Trust), says she’s pleased to see the increase in participation, but would like to see even more employees taking advantage of the Be Colorado Wellness program.

“We have some really cool things to introduce as part of the Be Colorado wellness program this spring and into the future. In conjunction with our Health Risk Assessment and digital health coaching, we will be launching a personal mission discovery tool after the new year,” Pollock said. “This tool has been used very successfully at the Human Performance Management Institute to help people set and maintain long-term health and achievement goals.

“We have also been hard at work developing an incentivized movement plan that will reward participants for meeting monthly exercise goals. Participants can meet goals in ways that best match their personal exercise priorities – whether walking, playing tennis, trail running, bicycling or in a gym. We’ll be using great online tools to track participation, and we’re working on employee discount programs at many local gyms and campus recreation centers to make that pathway more affordable.”

In addition to these, the Be Colorado team is looking to launch Weight Watchers at Work this spring, and is developing for fiscal year 2014 a smoking cessation program. The University of Colorado Health and Welfare Trust also is exploring ways to extend the Be Colorado wellness program to all employees and to all dependents of plan participants.

And congratulations to university employees James Parmenter (UCCS), Dorothy Moon and Colin Spaulding (CU-Boulder), Paul MacLean and Brent Pedersen (Anschutz Medical Campus), Ernest Porps (CU Denver), the three UCH employees and one from UPI, each of whom won a new electric-assisted bike for simply participating in this fall’s Be Colorado health screenings.

The Be Colorado team looks forward to even more participation in upcoming spring events, and we encourage you to explore our website, http://www.becolorado.org, to learn more about great wellness events across the university and to help us build a lively and active online wellness community.