How to Choose Health and Wellness Content in 2026
Research Report by CARAVAN Wellness
Health and wellness content is now standard across employers, health plans, and digital platforms. Most organizations already offer some form of it. The harder question is whether people actually use it, and whether it leads to meaningful outcomes.
The answer, for most, is no. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, 87% of organizations worldwide have a formal wellness initiative. Yet global employee engagement in wellness programs fell to just 20% that same year, matching the lowest levels since the pandemic.
The gap between offering content and driving engagement is the defining challenge of 2026. Closing it requires more than adding resources to a library. It requires choosing content that fits the way people actually work and live.
What’s Changing
In the past, most health and wellness content lived in large libraries, articles and PDFs waiting for users to find them. Most went unused. Today, the best-performing solutions bring content directly into the platforms employees already use: benefits portals, mobile apps, etc.
Format has changed just as much as location. Dash Social’s 2026 Health & Wellness Industry Benchmarks analyzed thousands of posts from the second half of 2025 across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The report found that shorter, well-structured videos consistently outperform longer formats in both views and audience retention. Brands generating the highest engagement on YouTube achieved an average 77% video retention rate by prioritizing quick expert interviews and concise value delivery. Long-form content, dominant just a year earlier, has been overtaken by formats that deliver value in the first 30 seconds.
At the same time, audience growth is outpacing engagement across the health and wellness sector. More content is being produced than ever. That makes quality and relevance the competitive variable.
What to Look for When Evaluating Content
1. Readability
The most overlooked factor in health and wellness content selection is whether employees can actually read it. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that 54% of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below a 6th-grade level. A 2025 ScienceDirect analysis of 100 patient education materials found that only 57% were sufficiently actionable, meaning nearly half left readers without a clear next step.
Research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that average readability of health education materials has not improved in three decades, remaining around an 11th-grade level. The CDC and NIH both recommend that public-facing health content target a 6th-grade level or below. Low health literacy is independently associated with higher rates of hospital readmission, emergency department visits, and worse long-term outcomes.
2. Format Variety
Different employees engage differently depending on the topic and their learning style. A strong solution offers multiple modalities: short video for high-engagement topics like stress and nutrition; articles for those who want to go deeper; interactive tools and assessments that make content participatory; and structured programs designed to build knowledge over time rather than deliver a one-time resource.
3. Real Experts and Peer-Driven Content
Healthcare content featuring real people generates a 45% higher engagement rate than content from institutional sources, according to Market.us research. Peer-driven and expert-led formats consistently outperform. When evaluating content, look for solutions that feature credentialed experts, practitioners, and relatable voices rather than generic or brand-produced material. This distinction in who delivers the content is as important as the format itself.
4. Personalization
Personalization has moved from a differentiating feature to a baseline expectation. A 2025 University of Washington and Mental Health America study published in JMIR Mental Health found that tailored content delivery significantly outperformed generic approaches for mental health resource engagement. Research published in Frontiers in Digital Health in January 2026 found that the tools succeeding are those that match content to user needs, goals, and readiness to act.
Personalization that works goes beyond recommendation algorithms. It includes content matched to health goals and life stage, format preferences, timing, and language and cultural context.
5. Where the Content Lives
Integration matters as much as content quality. When resources require a separate login or an unfamiliar portal, most employees never complete the journey. Traditional employee assistance programs consistently report utilization of 3% to 6%.
Compt’s 2025 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report found that when employees are given flexibility in how they access benefits, utilization reached 60%, with 71% choosing specialized local providers over national vendors.
6. Language and Cultural Relevance
For organizations with distributed or global teams, a content library that works in one language for one cultural context is not a solution. More than 74% of Spanish-speaking patients have less-than-adequate health literacy in English, compared to 7% of native English speakers. Cultural responsiveness goes beyond translation: it requires that the examples, imagery, and framing in content reflect the lives of the people it is designed to serve.
The 2025 ScienceDirect analysis identified limited cultural responsiveness as one of the three primary barriers to patient education engagement, alongside complex terminology and lack of visuals. For a multilingual workforce, those barriers compound.
Where Many Teams Get Stuck
The most common mistake in health and wellness content selection is treating library size as a proxy for value. A large catalog can feel like a solution. In practice, it often creates a different problem: employees open a platform, see dozens of undifferentiated resources, and leave without engaging.
A Business Group on Health 2025 survey found that 93% of organizations maintained or expanded their wellness offerings that year. Yet more offerings haven’t translated into more engagement. The focus is now shifting from producing more to making what exists more usable: integrating content into daily workflows, reducing friction at the point of access, and designing for ongoing engagement.
Designing for Ongoing Engagement
Lasting behavior change rarely comes from a single touchpoint. Physical health has historically been the default focus of workplace wellness — but it represents only one dimension of what employees are managing. A program that ignores financial stress, mental health, or other daily responsibilities will struggle to feel relevant to the people it is meant to serve.
Effective solutions build in mechanisms for sustained engagement: personalized recommendations that adapt over time, structured programs that guide behavior change across weeks or months, and regular nudges that surface content at relevant moments rather than waiting for employees to seek it out.
The Bottom Line
Most organizations don’t need more health and wellness content. They need content that works—readable for their population, available in the formats and languages their people actually use, integrated into the tools they already open every day, and designed to support sustained engagement rather than a single click.
The organizations closing the engagement gap are asking harder questions before they buy: Does the content meet accessibility and compliance standards? Will it integrate without adding friction? Does it support ongoing engagement, or just first use? Those questions, grounded in what the research consistently shows, are the ones that separate content that changes behavior from content that sits unused.
