Each week, a healthcare professional responds to a reader's query on an industry issue. This week's expert is William B. Baun, manager of wellness programs at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Question: How do you measure the success of wellness champion programs?

Response: Participation is very important. We can't belittle just counting heads. That's really important. But then you've got to move down to the behavior change that's taking place. You've got to have different measures for the different things that you're going after, be it stress reduction, improved nutrition or increased physical activity. That could be collected via an HRA or another survey — true outcome data where you're measuring cholesterol or blood pressure, diabetic measures or efforts where you're just trying to get people to better manage their chronic diseases.

It depends on the programs you're running and the focus of your goals and objectives for that year. We find in our programs that we have a variety of different measures. You're trying to keep up with that officially and cost-effectively. There are some things that we would love to be able to measure, but we just can't do it cost-effectively.

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