For hospital and health system wellness teams
Retire the weekly step form. Run every wellness challenge on autopilot.
Corporate wellness teams at hospitals and health systems run movement challenges for employer clients, community partners and their own staff. eFit replaces the printed calendar and the Monday submission form with automatic step tracking, fair scoring and reports your partners can see.
The challenge is a good idea. The paperwork holds it back.
Hospital wellness programs know how to motivate people. A month-long movement challenge for a partner employer or a residential community is a friendly, low-cost way to get people moving and to keep the hospital’s name in front of the community.
Many of these challenges still run on paper. Participants print a calendar, write down their steps each day, add them up and submit a total through an online form by noon every Monday. Anyone logging swimming or chair exercise converts minutes into steps with a chart. Late submissions are refused. A staff member then copies every form into a spreadsheet to find the top three.
Each of those steps is a place where a participant can drop out. Someone who misses one Monday deadline often stops tracking for good, and the organizer never hears from them again.
The research points the same way: a nationally delivered workplace step challenge raised daily steps by about 906 a day by week 8 across 10,183 participants. The format works when people keep taking part, and every manual step makes that harder.
Niven A. et al., “The Effectiveness of an Annual Nationally Delivered Workplace Step Count Challenge on Changing Step Counts,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021.
Six problems with form-based challenges, and how eFit solves them
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Weekly submission deadlines
A Monday-noon cutoff turns a health challenge into a homework assignment. One busy weekend and a participant falls out of the running.
Steps and active minutes sync automatically each day. There is nothing to submit.
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Self-reported totals
Hand-added weekly totals invite rounding, guessing and quiet doubts about whoever finishes first.
Activity comes straight from each participant’s phone or tracker through Google Health.
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Converting minutes into steps
Participants who swim, hand-cycle or do chair exercise have to translate their effort with a conversion chart.
Active minutes count alongside steps, so every kind of movement is recorded as it happens.
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Staff time spent tallying
Someone on the wellness team copies form entries into a spreadsheet every week and checks them by hand.
Organizers see participation and scores for every participant and group on one screen.
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Only the most active win
A prize for the most total steps goes to people who were already active. Everyone else stops trying by week two.
Each person is scored against a goal, and 70% of it counts as success, so a new walker can finish alongside a runner.
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Nothing to show the client
At the end, the sponsor gets a list of winners and a count of forms received.
A Baseline and Final Fitness Check shows each participant’s change, and organizer reports show participation over the whole challenge.
A form-based challenge next to eFit
| Task | Calendar and weekly form | eFit |
|---|---|---|
| Recording activity | Participant writes daily steps on a printed calendar | Syncs from the phone or tracker each day |
| Reporting | Weekly total submitted by form before a Monday deadline | Automatic, with no deadline |
| Other activities | Minutes converted to steps by hand | Active minutes count directly |
| Accuracy | Self-reported totals | Device data through Google Health |
| Progress during the month | Unknown until the forms are tallied | Activity Score, badges and Walking Journey map, updated daily |
| Winners | Top three by total steps | Everyone who reaches the goal, plus an optional leaderboard |
| Results for the sponsor | A spreadsheet assembled by staff | Participation and score reports by group |
How a hospital wellness team runs a challenge on eFit
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Set up the challenge for each partner
Name the challenge, choose the dates and the activity goal, and decide whether the leaderboard is on. Add groups for departments, locations or neighborhoods.
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Share one sign-up link
Put the link or a QR code on the flyer, the newsletter and the partner’s website. Participants create an account and connect Google Health on their phone in a few minutes, with step-by-step help.
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Record a starting point
Participants complete a short Baseline Fitness Check so they can see their own improvement at the end.
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Let the data come in
Steps and active minutes sync daily. Participants follow their Activity Score and earn badges. Your team watches participation and encourages groups that go quiet, with no forms to chase.
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Report results to the partner
The Final Fitness Check closes the challenge. Participants who reach the goal receive a completion certificate, and you have participation and score reports to share with the sponsor.
Built for the people a hospital wellness program serves
Hospital wellness teams reach employers, residential communities, schools and their own nurses and staff. Those audiences include retirees, shift workers and people recovering from surgery. eFit counts active minutes alongside steps, scores each person against a goal they can reach and keeps the leaderboard opt-in, which lets the least active participants join on their own terms. They are the people a wellness program most wants to reach, and the people a most-steps contest loses first.
Running a challenge for your own employees? See corporate fitness challenges. Partnering with a homeowner or neighborhood association? See neighborhood and HOA walking challenges.
Frequently asked questions
Questions from hospital wellness teams.
Have a different question? Tell us about your group and we will help map the right challenge.
Email support@efit.healthCan we run separate challenges for different client organizations?
Yes. Each challenge has its own name, dates, goal and participant list, so a wellness team can run one for an employer client, one for a residential community and one for its own staff at the same time.
Do participants need a specific fitness tracker?
No. Activity comes in through Google Health, which collects steps from a phone as well as many popular watches and tracker apps. Nobody has to buy a device to take part.
How do swimming, cycling and chair exercise count?
eFit counts active minutes alongside steps, so participants do not have to convert minutes into steps on a chart. Any activity their phone or watch records as active time counts toward the goal.
What happens if someone forgets to report for a week?
Nothing is lost, because nobody has to report. Activity syncs from the participant’s phone or tracker each day, and there is no Monday deadline to miss.
Can the hospital see individual health data?
Organizers see challenge participation and activity scores so they can support the group. Participants choose whether their name appears on the leaderboard, and they can remove eFit’s access in their Google account at any time.
How is a challenge priced?
Pricing is per participant, and the sponsoring organization can be invoiced for the whole group. Send the expected headcount and dates and we will put together a quote.
Start the conversation
Move your next challenge off paper.
Tell us which partner or community the challenge is for, roughly how many people you expect and when it starts. We will help you set up the challenge, the groups and the sign-up link.