Keas – The Health Care Blog

Keas Poll on Workplace Stress and Disease Burden Provides an Education

May 2, 2014• 12

By VIK KHANNA & AL LEWIS

Al’s son once complained to Al’s Aunt Tillie about an overbearing supervisor. Aunt Tillie suggested that he try to work under a different supervisor. Tillie was one of those people – and we all know them – who could be counted on to inadvertently provide punchlines when needed. Conversely, Al is one of those people – and we all know them – who can’t resist setting up those punchlines. So I lamented that this suggestion may not work because, “Aunt Tillie, it’s a sobering fact that 50% of all supervisors are below average.”

Tillie replied, “I blame our educational system for that.”

Likewise, we may need to blame our educational system for Keas’ new poll on workplace stress. To begin with, the lead paragraph from Keas — which like many other companies is “the market leader” in wellness – “reveals” that “4 in 10 employees experience above-average stress.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (Apr 2, 2014) – Keas (www.keas.com), the market leader in employer health and engagement programs, today released new survey data, revealing four in ten employees experience above average levels of job-related stress. Keas is bringing attention to these findings to kick off Stress Awareness Month, and is also providing additional insight and tips to bring greater awareness to the role of stress in the workplace and its impact on employee health.

Wouldn’t that mean some other employees – mathematically, also 6 in 10 – must be experiencing average or below-average levels of stress? It would seem like mathematically that would have to be the case. However, the Keas poll also “reveals” that while some employees are average in stress, no employee is below-average – a true paradox. Hence Keas’ selfless reasons for publishing this poll: All employees being either average or above average in the stress department means we have a major stress epidemic on our hands. This perhaps explains why Keas is “bringing attention to these findings.”

In a further paradox, Keas also uses the words “average” and “normal” as synonyms, even though they are often antonyms: All of us want our children to be normal but who amongst us wants their children to be average?

Why Mint.com for Health Is a Terrible Idea

Jan 20, 2012• 7

By Wade Roush

If you’re a hammer, you just want to smash nails; if you’re a programmer, you just want to build features. But features do not a successful product make. This is the central myopia that eventually blinds even the most brilliant engineer-entrepreneurs, unless they’re smart enough to surround themselves with people who can check their bias.

If you want an interesting example of this phenomenon, look no further than Adam Bosworth, the co-founder and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based health gamification startup Keas. There’s no question about this guy’s brilliance. At Citicorp in the late 1970s, he invented an analytical processing system that helped the bank predict changes in inflation and exchange rates. At Borland, he built the Quattro spreadsheet, and at Microsoft, he built the Access database. He was one of the first to propose standards for XML—the foundation of most Web services today. At Google, he helped to develop Google Docs before moving on to start Google Health.

But as everyone knows, Google Health was a failure—and so was Bosworth’s next effort, Keas, at least until the venture-backed startup went through a dramatic pivot in 2010. How Bosworth figured out that his old approach wasn’t working, and how Keas reinvented itself as a provider of health-focused games for large employers, is the tale I want to tell you today.