At Avail we have a mantra we try to promote throughout all of our business practices, whether that be how we interact with clients, the way we build our technology or simply how we interact with our co-workers, clients, friends or family. That mantra being "what gets measured, gets managed". In other words, we make a conscious effort to reflect on our actions. We take note of where we had room to improve, how we can do better next time and we make a point of celebrating our successes.

Taking the time to regularly reflect whether it be on your work, how you interact with others or something as important as your health and well-being is the most effective way to manage challenges and begin to take the necessary steps to overcome them.

Sounds great right?! But, finding an effective way to self-reflect can be quite challenging and remembering to do it, even more so. 

To help simplify this experience, we created the Avail check-up. More specifically the Avail check-up was developed with our clinical team, data scientists, wellness experts and users to produce an evidence based, digital assessment that measures what we collectively believe are the 10 most pertinent categories that make up an individuals overall well-being.

Each week when you complete your check-up, you're asked 1 question related to each of these 10 categories. Using your responses and some fancy math (more on this later) we calculate a score for each category.

Sound pretty simple right!? Well, that's kind of the point... Our job is to do the hard part to simplify this challenging & often complex process so you don't have to.
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Okay great, but what do the scores actually mean, where do they come from and what's the research behind it?

When you complete your check-up each week, Avail looks at the difference between how you answer each question and how a "healthy individual" (HI) would answer the question. The values we use to represent this HI were developed through the completion of more than 300,000 check-ups. Our various models consider the industry you work in, your location, seasonality, weather, and much more to ensure we provide as accurate an assessment as possible.

For the math-y folks out there, the "difference" were talking about is simply the number of standard deviations away from the values representing our HI. 

Each standard deviation away from "perfectly health" represents an increased level of risk. So, if you are one standard deviation away from healthy, your score will be Room to Improve, two or more deviations and you'll see Some Concern. The further you deviate from this healthy value, the higher your risk becomes of developing a mental health or well-being related issue and the lower your overall Avail Score. The opposite is also true. If your responses are instead representative of a risk level that is lower than our HI values, you will see a score of Thriving.

Alright, let's talk about the research and where the questionnaire came from. 

When initially launched in 2017, Avail's check-up was simply a digitized version of the REST-Q. A 48 Question Recovery-Stress screening, clinically and scientifically validated over the last 20 years by Dr. Wolfgang Callus Ph.D.

"The Recovery-Stress Questionnaire (RESTQ) is an instrument that allows measuring the recovery-stress state of individuals systematically. The recovery-stress state indicates the extent to which these individuals are stressed emotionally, socially, mentally or physically, and whether or not compensatory recovery states or activities occurred in the past days. As a result, the recovery-stress state reflects the current state of the person's well-being." -- Dr. Wolfgang Callus.
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Since launching this initial version of our check-up, more than 300,000 check-ups have been completed by more than 40,000 participants. Using this incredible data set, our clinical team has refined our check-up by reducing the number of questions asked while improving the accuracy of the assessment.
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A research report published in 2014, examining 114 publications on newly-developed patient reported outcomes measures (i.e. clinically validated questionnaires), reported that 90% of these measures were developed with only 100 participants. Only 7% had more than 1,000 participants. Comparatively, Avail's check-up has been developed and validated with nearly 400 times the standard number of participants and a science team with a collective 100 years of industry experience.
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We get it... this is your health & well-being that we're talking about and we're here to support you. If you have any more questions, concerns or just want to chat, our support team is Available Monday through Sunday (9-8PM EST). Simply click that friendly looking message bubble icon in the bottom right corner of your screen or if you're using our mobile app, open the side bar and click on "contact support" to begin a conversation.

References:
SAGE Publishing, D. C. (2016, December 08). Validating a Questionnaire. Retrieved March 08, 2019, from https://www.methodspace.com/validating-a-questionnaire/