I can only relate the kind of changes that we experienced, but in those locations where we had a wellness program in place for at least one to two years, we saw a decrease of 4.3% in our workman's compensation claims, and that's substantial.
Additionally, in over a one year period, where we had coaches that had influence over about 4,000 employees, those employees interacted with our wellness coach over 74,000 times in that year period. And they did it on a strictly voluntary basis. Of those 4,000 employees, 172 of those employees quit smoking. Over 2,600 hundred went on a weight reduction program, losing over 6,000lbs. That's incredible to me.
So those are real health risk factors that you want to drive down. And if you're driving down those risk factors, two things happen; one, you're getting a healthier employee and two; you're driving down your health care costs.

A normal day would see the coach in their office, with the door open, waiting for employees to come to them with a health issue, but it also involves the coach going out into the workplace, going out onto the dock or the drivers lounge for example and putting exercise programs in place. So they have to strike a real balance between being reactive and proactive.

Most wellness coaches come with a diverse background both experientially and in their education. That's important because there are many elements that comprise living a healthy lifestyle. We actually put a coach in the place of employment so that they were very accessible to our employees, making it very easy for them to drop in, ask questions and in the process, develop a trusting relationship. And we gave our employees permission to go and talk the coach whether their on or off the clock.

I think there are three key elements to the success of any wellness program. The first is buy-in. It's critical to get buy-in from the employees for any wellness program to succeed. If they don't buy in, the other two parts just don't work.
The second part is to engage them in a health-risk assessment. If they voluntarily participate in a health-risk assessment, the employee has already taken the first step to improving their health.
The third thing is confidentiality. Confidentiality is a critical piece of the health and wellness puzzle. The employee has to feel comfortable that any information they give will stay with their wellness coach and not be shared beyond that.