HealthPartners has plenty of data to show if its patients are healthy, but no clue whether they also are happy.
At least not yet.
The Bloomington-based provider of health care and insurance is launching a new annual survey of people's well-being, because studies suggest that personal satisfaction can promote better health and less need for health care.
That's not to say that positive well-being is a requirement for good health, or vice versa, said Dr. Thomas Kottke, a cardiologist recently named as HealthPartners' medical director for well-being. "There are folks, quadriplegic with broken necks, who have very high levels of well-being."
But HealthPartners nonetheless sees dividends down the road if it can both assess and improve the well-being of the people it serves.
Starting this year, the organization will survey 5,000 of its patients and members on its homegrown definition of well-being, which includes six components: emotional functioning, physical functioning, career satisfaction, adequacy of financial resources, social/interpersonal relations, community support, and meaning and purpose.
HealthPartners will then aggregate the results and compare whether the sense of well-being in the community improves each year. The organization also hopes to break down survey results by geographic or racial group to see if there are disparities.
Lastly, the well-being results will be compared with HealthPartners' clinical data on whether patients adopt healthy habits, such as exercising and refraining from smoking, or whether they have disabilities or chronic diseases.
