To do that, HealthKeys takes a staple of many employee wellness programs, the biometric screening, and uses the data collected through the screenings to build the employer's risk-management plan.

"We don't rely on self-reported data," Chiappino explains. "We use actual biometrics and integrate those with predictive modeling tools, incentive forecasting and other tools that we provide to brokers.

"We integrate incentives with employee contributions so that the contributions have meaning," he adds. "If we screen for body mass index or cholesterol in the biometric screening, then there's a bar that gets set, and you can tie employee cost-sharing to achieving certain biometric screening scores. It's a very clear connection."

Many traditional employee wellness programs include annual biometric screenings as well as health goals, but these programs haven't been effective due to a lack of employee accountability, Chiappino says – and that's where HealthKeys stands out in the marketplace.

"A wellness company will do a biometric screening, too, and its great information," he notes. "But we found there was a lack of accountability. Employees went in to the programs, pointed and clicked – someone told me just the other day that they finished their employer's wellness program in 15 minutes, and I thought, 'What does checking off a list of activities have to do with improving biometric screening scores?'

"Improved biometric screening scores equals improved health in your clients," he continues. "And there is no correlation between someone saying that they participated in a walking program and improving their body-mass index. We take the biometric data and tie incentives to employees improving or maintaining those scores."

Chiappino notes that incentivizing health care consumers to improve their behaviors has been outlined in recent legislation, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and HealthKeys helps employers establish reasonable, compliant goals and manage these incentives.

"You have to give consumers reasonable standards," he explains. "We prefer to use relaxed standards – for example, if the National Institute of Health says that body-mass index should be at 25, we set the goal at 30. We're not trying to make supermodels out of everybody, but we want people to look at their biometric scores and take them seriously, because if they do take them seriously and their metrics improve, claims go down."

So HealthKeys helps employers set reasonable goals for employees, sometimes focusing on improving biometric screening scores rather than requiring all health plan enrollees to meet national standards (and penalizing them if they cannot or do not comply).

"It's not necessarily healthy to go from a body-mass index of 50 to a body-mass index of 30 in a year," he points out. "So we test employees every year, and if they show a 5 percent overall improvement in their body-mass index, they've achieved the goal."

By using biometric screening data year after year, HealthKeys allows employers to dig into the biggest health issues affecting their businesses without relying on self-reported data

"We do ask clients whether or not they are taking medication for certain conditions," Chiappino says, "which is about as much self-reported data as we collect. And we can look at that data and align it with the biometric screening data. If a client's employee tells me that he's been prescribed blood-pressure medication, and we see in the biometric screening that his blood pressure is 160 over 100, that tells us that he isn't taking his medication. So we can catalogue all of these people who are noncompliant with their meds; it's low-hanging fruit, and we can report back to the employer how many of their employees are noncompliant with these medications. It gives the broker one more area to consult with the client, using data that they never had access to before."

HealthKeys ensures all data collected is in a HIPAA-compliant format, and then HealthKeys consultants are able to use predictive models to project claims, absenteeism and presenteeism predictions using hard data.

"Clients can focus on the specific issues that affect their particular group," Chiappino notes, "and showing improvement in those areas gives the client ammunition with their vendors, because if that improvement translates to lower claims, it puts the employer in a fairly good negotiating position with everyone from stop-loss vendors to insurance companies.

"We want brokers to be able to provide this level of consulting in the marketplace – and they're not doing it because they don't have the tools," he concludes. "This isn't rocket science; once brokers have the tools to control the data, they can offer a better consulting service than they've ever offered before."