Abstract
Kurt Lewin, the founding father of social psychology once said, “There’s nothing so practical as good theory.” 1 In my early health promotion career as a developer and implementer of workplace health programs, I was drawn to theory and research because it increased the likelihood that I’d succeed in helping the individuals I was working with to improve their health via lifestyle behavior changes that were sustained over time. It’s what drove me to return to school for a master of public health degree and I still remember how excited I was about my first theory course. I still have the textbook that introduced me to the socioecologic model 2 and vividly remember how excited I was to gain new insight about why some of the programs and coaching I delivered yielded such short-term outcomes. It was as though I’d discovered the crown jewels! An ecological approach asserts that the most effective behavior change initiatives combine individual- and group-level interventions with environmental, cultural, and societal supports such as health-promoting policies, facilities, access to resources, and social support.
The Art of Health Promotion aims to bridge research and practice by curating content that provides evidence-based guidance and real-world examples of effective approaches to health promotion. One of the most practical tools employers can use to determine whether their health promotion initiatives are informed by research and theory are organizational health scorecards. These free scorecards have several key benefits. First and foremost, they serve as an educational tool to identify the strategies and practices associated with effective health promotion initiatives. Second, they provide a quantified score that helps the user assess the gap between their current efforts and future potential scores, which can support a third benefit of informing the development of a strategic plan for enhancements and improvements. Organizational health scorecards can also help employers to formulate a more thoughtful program evaluation strategy and support data gathering that demonstrates the value of the initiative. A final benefit is yielded when several individuals from different organizational areas, functions, or perspectives come together to collaboratively complete the assessment. This not only ensures the assessment is an accurate reflection of what the organization is doing to advance health and well-being, it also creates the opportunity for discussion about how efforts in one area of the organization align with efforts in another.
The Art of Health Promotion first addressed the issue of organizational health scorecards in the May/June 2013 issue, 3 and there has been such substantial change in the accessibility and quality of scorecards available to health promotion professionals that an update is in order. I am honored to partner with my guest co-editor, Dr Enid Chung Roemer, in creating this issue.
In this issue, we feature 4 of the most widely used tools evident in published health promotion research: the American Heart Association’s Workplace Health Achievement Index, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Worksite Health ScoreCard, the Health Enhancement Research Organization’s Health and Well-being Best Practices Scorecard in Collaboration with Mercer, and the Wellness Council of America’s Well Workplace Checklist. The contributors each provide a short history of the development of their respective instruments, the administrative process, benchmarking features, and validation research. They also offer some resources and guidance to using their scorecard.
In conclusion, Dr Roemer discusses the evolution of organizational health scorecards since the 2013 issue on this topic, offers a summary comparing and contrasting the featured tools, and provides guidance on how to select the best tool to fit an organization’s needs. As someone who transitioned from health promotion practitioner to outcomes researcher out of a desire to improve the effectiveness of health promotion efforts in the field, I highly recommend any one of these scorecards for like-minded professionals. Although some organizations balk at the effort involved in completing these scorecards, the relatively small investment of time is worth the effort to ensure the resources devoted to health promotion is money well spent.