2023 has been an amazing year at Vitrue Health! We’ve helped tens of thousands of users reduce their pain, with over a hundred thousand ergonomic and behavioural and lifestyle changes made to avoid pain. From doubling the size of our team, to moving to our new headquarters in Old Street and expanding to another 11 countries across the world, we’ve been busy! We took some time to reflect and sum up the year.

A reminder of why we’re here

Our mission is to eliminate musculoskeletal pain for millions of people. 62% of people working at a desk are living with musculoskeletal issues like back pain and $1.7 trillion worth of productivity is lost each year due to these issues. While physiotherapy is an effective solution, the fact is only a small minority of these people will escalate to traditional healthcare pathways. That’s where VIDA helps with earlier interventions to prevent and address pain for the rest of us.

Product updates

VIDA has expanded massively this year with many new features to improve pain reduction for our users. These new features include better tracking of actions to reduce pain, streamlined admin management and a huge number of integrations. Here’s a taste of the new features: 

1. Integrations for HRIS and LMS systems make managing your MSK benefit and DSE compliance a cinch. After introducing integrations to over 40 new providers, we’ve seen 99% completion rates for customers with full integrations into existing systems.

2. Company specific recommendations allow companies to tailor VIDA to their culture and signpost to existing benefits and materials. Already have an EAP or Unmind or Peppy subscription that could help? You can integrate it into VIDA to highlight it to your employees with specific pains or risks.

3. A new interactive feature to track actions taken in VIDA allows users to tick off workplace wellbeing recommendations after acting on them. On average VIDA users took at least 2.3 pain reducing actions recommended in their reports meaning that 99% completion rate with 1,000 employees turns into over 2,250 actions for reducing risk and preventing MSK pain before it takes hold.

4. Streamlined compliance: VIDA’s new monthly summary emails allow companies to streamline compliance workflows. Just onboard your team to the platform and let VIDA keep you up to date on compliance across the business, keep track of who needs help, what actions have already been taken and how your teams compare against industry averages.

5. Workplace resilience: There’s a strong and well proven link between musculoskeletal pain and higher rates of burnout. That’s why we launched our clinically validated burnout companion assessment two years ago. This year, we turned it around to focus on helping your team to work on their workplace resilience and avoid burnout in the first place.

6. Enterprise specific features: VIDA now supports a much wider array of SSO providers with full automated user provisioning support. Meaning DSE compliance and access to this benefit is almost completely automatic. We also received our ISO27001 certification, expanded the functionality to specify where data is stored and made it easy to export reports for your quarterly updates. Finally you can now add your branding and logo to VIDA to make it even clearer how you as a company value your teams’ wellbeing.

7. Posture improvement program: 42% of users with back pain reported poor posture as the cause. Even for those without musculoskeletal pain, improving posture was the top goal stated by our users. In response we launched our 4 week posture improvement program. Four minute guided stretches completed twice a day lowers the risk of musculoskeletal pain, increases productivity and even lowers stress!

Our latest research and clinical proof that VIDA lowers pain 

Scientific validity is a core value at Vitrue and we pride ourselves in not only basing our product algorithms on the latest research, but also producing our own original research. Our comprehensive dataset, including data on the way tens of thousands of people work and what their aches and pains are, put us in a unique position to understand how humans can be set up to work without musculoskeletal pain. 

We’ve spent a lot of time this year studying the effects of rolling out VIDA on rates of MSK pain. One of the methods is through large scale cohort analyses. We were delighted to share earlier this year that the average VIDA user significantly reduces their pain (p<0.005) with average pain reductions of  2.3 points on the standard 10 point VAS scale. 

Some example data insights from this year:

• On average, fully remote workers report pain at 11% higher rates than office workers. 

• Females report more musculoskeletal pain with drastically higher rates for shoulder (3.6x), hip (2.65x) and neck pain (1.9x). Pain across other areas like hamstrings, elbows and lower back are more consistent across males and females.

• 17% of people experience intense musculoskeletal pain and of those, 60% have pain in more than one area of their body.

• People whose monitors are set up at the right height are 2.2x less likely to have neck pain.

• 42% of users who have a standing desk are using it incorrectly (and likely increasing their risks).

• One in five users with pain will complete an online guided stretching program -92% of those users experience a reduction of pain with an average of 34% pain reduction.

What our customers think

Like every year, in 2023 we tried to spend as much time as possible listening to our customers and our users. In addition to filling our roadmap with amazing features, we’re delighted to see the response VIDA has had through our Trustpilot with 96% of reviewers giving VIDA 5/5 stars!

New partners

We were delighted to start working with some fantastic new partners in 2023. From global expansion with Bupa to new customers like E.ON Next, Hastings Direct, Datadog and many more amazing employers. In the U.S. we’re also delighted to be part of the National Safety Council’s TechHub initiative. 

On the road

Our team loves nothing more than face to face time with new and prospective customers. We’ve got a full events calendar for 2024, so if you’re attending a health and safety or wellbeing event look out for us!

Roadmap – What’s coming

Without ruining the surprise we are very very excited for what’s coming next year. We’re expanding both the breadth and depth of our assessments and personalising a user’s experience even further based on how they like to spend their time, whether they’re a golfer, a knitter or they spend their time running after toddlers. We’ll be further expanding the inclusivity of VIDA for those with mobility challenges and there’ll be new products specially designed for other kinds of work. Stay tuned, a lot of this will be coming in the first half of the year!

On to 2024

As we wrap up an incredible year, we extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s been part of our journey. The excitement for 2024 is palpable, and we’re eager to unveil the innovations we’ve been working on. We’re just getting started, and the best is yet to come!

If you’re an existing customer, or considering becoming one and you’d like to hear more about anything above, just reach out here or at shane@vitruehealth.com