Medical Solutions: SOAP-ing Your Wellness Program? - The "O" of SOAP

Welcome back. Here we are at the next installment of how to SOAP your wellness program. In case you didn’t get a chance to read the first installment of this series: SOAP is a system for evaluating and putting together a plan for any program or project. One of the first things I learned in nursing school was how to use the SOAP system when evaluating and planning the care of a patient. The acronym SOAP stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan. Last week we took a look at the “S” of SOAP. Now we are moving on to the “O”.

Objective information is based on facts rather than feelings or opinions and is not influenced by feelings.1 In the health care environment, an example of objective information would be a patient’s body temperature reading. Objective data in the health care setting, therefore, can be defined as data that is factual, unbiased, and unchanged by personal feelings or interpretations.2

I bet you can tell what comes next. No? Well, now we need employee biometric screening: Blood pressure, pulse, height, weight, blood sugar, lipid profile, cholesterol, A1C. Seems simple enough, right? Just bring in an outside company to do this part. Surprisingly, this is where most workplaces get bogged down. Employee screenings take man hours to set up and run, as well as dollars to fund the testing. What’s worse is many of these screening programs bring with them inherent inaccuracies and delays inaccuracies and delays stemming from the manual entry of information collected on paper into a spread sheet or general digital form. It can take weeks from the collection of the objective data to the generation of actionable information. This is valuable time lost.

SO...What’s an HR/Wellness manager to do? I know! You’re thinking,

Have no fear, the 21st century is here! This process doesn’t have to be painful. There is a new mobile application that combats the painstaking barriers for gathering your Subjective and Objective information. Yes, there is a digital way to conduct health screening! What’s more it even generates “real time” reports!

Who would have thought that a series of article about employee wellness programs could be so exciting! I know, right? So here comes the cliff-hanger.

Before we discover the name of this revolutionary application, let’s finish SOAP-ing your Wellness Program.

Next Week: The "A" of SOAP

1  (Merriam-Webster dictionary.com)
2  (ehow.com definitions)