According to the American Journal of Health Promotion, a peer-reviewed journal on the science of lifestyle change, the wellness industry is projected to reach about $6 billion in revenue by next year, and just about everyone involved has something to sell.

For corporations that want to start a wellness plan or just fine-tune the one they have, that's a lot of vendor advice to have to sift through.

Knowing what to screen for, knowing what to measure, measuring accurately, trusting the measuring process itself, addressing privacy concerns, to name just a few of the issue, can approach overwhelming pretty quickly.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, industry critics Al Lewis and Vik Khanna – themselves vendors who evaluate existing wellness programs for companies – suggest consulting the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) screening guidelines before accepting any particular vendor screening guidelines.

One of the most accepted screenings and perhaps most unnecessary, suggests Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corp., is the annual checkup.

In otherwise healthy individuals, it's a waste patient and physician time, he believes, hurts productivity, costs money, and has the potential to create real medical problems when tests and biopsies are ordered to refute false positives.

For healthy individuals, few screenings need to be done every year, an increasing number of experts are beginning to advise.

Sooner or later, though, a wellness vendor will have to selected.

Consultant John Bates, writing on the blog WellnessProposals.com, suggests asking some of the following questions:

What methods are used to reduce health risks and have they been used by other companies? If so, how many?
Is there any testimonial data from previous companies to support the use of the proposed corporate wellness company system?
Does the company offer complimentary wellness resources?
What kind of ongoing measurement do they advocate and how do they monitor follow-up strategies?
Do they have a method for ensuring referrals are completed?
In what way can you determine that the program is successful?
Do they list options for internal marketing of the program?
Do they supply incentive ideas for participation and have data to support this?
Do they offer any recruiting suggestions?

Instant Insights /

Don&rsquo;t let your wellness program get sick

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Don’t let your wellness program get sick