Josh Stevens is CEO of corporate wellness company Keas. 

[Editor's note: Stevens Comcast Ventures' Michael Yang will be debating the topic of educating employees on health benefits at HealthBeat 2013 next week. See Yang's story: "Health assistants can make patients smarter and employees healthier."]

I have met with over 200 enterprises in the last year. About half did not provide PCs, smartphones or Internet access to their employees. At first, this may not come as a surprise, because many roles in corporate America do not require online access to “do the job.”

However, a lack of online access to help employees enroll for benefits, change their healthcare plan or modify their 401K means that employees are far less likely to use or even be aware of the benefits they have. This digital divide hurts the employees and the company they work for.

This is particularly true when it comes to health care. The companies I visit with are self-insured, paying for their employees’ healthcare. When I visit with a CEO, CFO, or CHRO, it’s usually to consult and help the company drive up employee participation in and use of the health and wellness benefits available to them.

When I ask, “How many of your employees have email and online access?” the conversation usually gets awkward as the employer realizes that many employees who are eligible for benefits don’t have effective online access to understand and use them.

A number of enterprise employers are still communicating with digitally unconnected employees via posters in the cafeteria like they did a decade ago.

Why is this a problem?

Those who have online access have access to tools and resources about how to improve their health and lower their risk factors. Those who don’t are left in the dark and may therefore be at higher risk.

Today, the average American self-insured employer pays $10,000 for an employee’s health care per year. Seventy percent of that amount, or $7,000, is absolutely preventable. But that that requires an effective wellness and prevention program.

Our estimate for the cost of getting employees online is about $100 per employee per year.

Netted against the $7,000 of health costs that can be prevented, the investment is well worth the opportunity — up to a 70x return.

Company-wide initiatives, such as biometric screenings and HRAs to lower healthcare costs, can’t achieve meaningful impact if the most basic communications can’t reach the workforce.  Those unconnected and at risk are blue-collar workers — kitchen staff, drivers and janitors — who often comprise a large part of a company’s workforce.

Here are five tips for designing and implementing company-wide information access systems that reach everyone in the organization:

1. Understand that access is key
   Company-wide should mean company-wide. Ensuring communication reaches every employee is essential. That may mean putting a smartphone, tablet, or mobile device in the hand of every worker.

2. Develop a plan to get connected
   Determine the best online program to implement and the best strategic approach for rolling it out to everyone in the organization. Create a detailed roadmap and assess possible barriers to widespread adoption.

3. Provide hands-on interactive education
   Engage the workforce with inclusive classes and step-by-step instruction. Make it fun, get people interested, foster group involvement so everyone can learn the same way and understand what the benefits are.

4. Find applications that are easy to deploy
   Program upgrades and enhancements must be simple to roll out company-wide in a timely way.

5. Provide tracking and reporting to see where it’s gaining traction
   Have a program that tracks progress in a clear and compelling way, and decode that data to identify best practices and areas for improvement.

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via photopin cc

French president François Hollande has just issued a massive challenge to get high-speed Internet access to every home in France within the next three to 10 years.

In a talk on “the ambition [of] digital France and its willingness to develop very high speed [Internet access] throughout” the country, Hollande told citizens this initiative will cost the equivalent of $26.3 billion, which will come from a mix of public and private-sector sources.

The necessary investments will be coordinated by a governmental group set up specifically for that purpose. Telecommunications firms may face a relatively small tax to help fund the project.

The bulk of the job — including half of France’s homes and infrastructure in densely populated areas — costs $9.2 billion and should be finished by late 2014.

As recently as 2007, France outstripped the U.S. in terms of high-speed Internet infrastructure. And as of 2009, France was the second-largest ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) market in Europe.

Increasing the availability and speed of Internet access has been a priority for many governments around the world. Leading up to the U.S. presidential election last fall, our own President Barack Obama told Americans, “Building a nationwide broadband network will strengthen our economy and put more Americans back to work. … By connecting every corner of our country to the digital age, we can help our businesses become more competitive, our students become more informed, and our citizens become more engaged.”

Job creation and business competition were two key points in Hollande’s presentation as well.

China is notorious for its unreliable wifi, so it’s easy to forget that it’s a massive internet hub with 450 million people surfing the web.

With vast differences in broadband speeds across the country, China Web Report has compiled this useful infographic to help you get online. The Chinese tech blog said it had garnered a great deal of interest about the differences in Internet speeds, and the correlation to demographic, economic and social factors.

We recently reported that the rise of tablet computing may spell the death of the desktop PC, but in China, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of people are not surfing the web on their smartphones.

As you might guess, the fastest broadband is accessible in the urban sprawls like Shanghai and Beijing. Inland, there is virtually zero Internet access. The research also revealed that it’s tougher to surf the web during the evening and early morning hours. If you’re still struggling, you may want to consider switching your telecom provider to China Telecom, which boasts the fastest broadband speeds.

Of course, if you’re struggling to access basic web search (Google, Bing, and so on) or your favorite social networking sites, it may be that you’re simply cut-off. The Chinese government is extremely stringent with electronic communications; for years, it prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom.”

Read the full report here.

Infographic courtesy of China Web Report / Top Image via Flickr (jblyberg)

Internet access might not be a human right, but having a connection to the web can help people get more access to their rights, to new opportunities, to better information — to the world. And with a $300 million subsidy, the U.S. government is hoping to bring that access to more people in remote areas of the country.

The US. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Wednesday this huge sum would be coming into the Connect America Fund, a program intended to bring broadband Internet connections into nearly half a million rural homes and businesses that currently have no Internet access at all.

The service will come via U.S. telecommunications companies, which have a three-month period to decide whether or not to participate in the new CAF initiative.

The $300 million subsidy comes with some handcuffs; telecoms will have to commit to robust plans to build out their networks. These companies will also likely be bringing investment dollars of their own to the project.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the cash infusion represented a “once-in-a-generation reform” of the country’s universal service goals as mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The chairman also stated, “All Americans will benefit while our nation’s global competitiveness is strengthened.”

The United Nations last year went so far as to call Internet access a human right, stating in a report, “Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states.”

via The Hill

Vint Cerf, one of the godfathers of the web and chief Internet evangelist for Google, wrote a controversial op-ed for the New York Times today saying that Internet access is not a human right.

With all the protests and unrest around the world being fueled by social media and access to the Internet, people started discussing the idea of the Internet as a human right, something every person on Earth should be privy to no matter his or her circumstance. In light of uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries, the United Nations went on to declare that the Internet access was a human right back in June. “Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states,” the U.N stated in the June report.

But Cerf — ever a thought leader — has decided against this idea. He asserts that the Internet (and any other form of technology) is only an enabler of human rights. He believes that human rights “must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” And he further argues that if we decide technology belongs in this category, we’re over-prioritizing. He writes:

It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

When it comes to the idea of the Internet as a “civil right,” Cerf buckles a bit. He believes it’s much easier to make the case that the Internet is a civil right because it is conferred by the law and “not intrinsic to us as human beings.” The wide spread of telephone lines and broadband Internet throughout the U.S., even to the remotest regions of the country, is a good example of “universal access” that basically amounts to a civil right.

I don’t agree with Cerf, but it’s something I’ll have to think more about. Cerf categorizes the Internet as just a form of technology, but what if the Internet is more than that and something that can inherently make our lives better or more complete? Someone with Internet access can experience and change the world more so than someone without access. And as a firm supporter of worldwide universal access, I find it easier to make the argument that someone must have the Internet if it is a human right and not just a piece of technology.

What do you think? Is the Internet a human right, a civil right, both or neither?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

More people in the United States will access the web via mobile devices than via wireline computers by 2015, according to a new study from IDC.

“Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet,” said Karsten Weide, IDC research vice president of media and entertainment, in a statement. “Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it’s going to make the Internet a very different place.”

The statistic isn’t exactly shocking when you consider the staggering number of smartphones with data plans being sold today. But it does confirm just how fast that number is growing, and it sheds light on how user behavior will likely change during the next few years. With faster 4G network speeds and increased coverage, it’s easy to see that many users would simply use their connected phones or tablets rather than PCs reliant on a home or work connection.

Specifically, IDC predicts that the number of U.S. mobile web users will grow annually by a compound growth rate of 16.6% between 2010 and 2015. The study also predicts that the total number of Internet users in the world will grow from 2 billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, giving 40 percent of the world access.

Other slightly less important points of the research focus on consumer e-commerce spending and advertiser spending. The study indicates that global e-commerce spending will move from $708 billion in 2010 to $1.3 trillion in 2015. It also predicts worldwide online advertising will increase from $70 billion in 2010 to $138 billion in 2015, with ad share across media types growing from 11.9% to 17.8%.

Based on these predictions, mobile device and web adoption will continue growing at an incredible rate. Consumers are hungry for the latest mobile devices, especially from market leaders like Apple and Samsung, and it’s unlikely they’ll be satiated any time soon.

Photo via tinkerbrad