According to the American Journal of HealthPromotion, a peer-reviewed journal on the scienceof lifestyle change, the wellness industry is projected to reachabout $6 billion in revenue by next year, and just about everyoneinvolved has something to sell.

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

Knowing what to screen for, knowing what to measure, measuringaccurately, trusting the measuring process itself, addressingprivacy concerns, to name just a few of the issue, can approachoverwhelming pretty quickly.

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

One of the most accepted screenings and perhaps mostunnecessary, suggests Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a health policyresearcher at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corp., is theannual checkup.

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

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

Sooner or later, though, a wellness vendor will have toselected.

Consultant John Bates, writing on the blogWellnessProposals.com, suggests asking some of thefollowing questions:

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