When it comes to fighting health costs, you have to know your enemy. The two chronic conditions that drive yours (and your peers’)  through the roof: smoking and obesity.

Both cause multiple chronic health conditions and both are behaviors that can be changed.

Ideally, your company works to attack both problems. But if you can only focus on one, make it your overweight employees. For one, it’s a bigger pool: 1 in 3 U.S. adults are obese (vs. 1 in 5 who smoke). Plus you’ll see a faster payoff: With tobacco cessation programs you don’t reap the benefits until the second year. But with weight loss programs, it can take only a few months.

There’s an app for that

All it takes is a 5% decrease in a person’s bodyweight for your organization to enjoy a decrease in healthcare costs. Which is why you want to do all you can to get employees eating less and moving more.

And while you can hold plenty of Biggest Loser-esque contests and form lunchtime walking groups til the cows come home, to see real success, you will have to make it personal for each individual.

That’s where smartphones and similar tech devices come in.

There’s no shortage of free apps that let employees track what they put in their mouths and when they put on their sneakers. Note: There are also plenty of websites that do the same from people’s desktops.

Why not allow that technology to do the work for you?

How it could work: Employees can select the program (or programs) of their choice, then submit weekly progress reports for your company to keep track of.

Once employees hit a milestone, you can reward them with whatever incentive your company’s chosen.

It’s one of the easiest wellness initiatives you can institute. The technology’s done the lion’s share, so your administrative costs are extremely low. And you enjoy the boost to your bottom line from a leaner, meaner workforce.

That’s the upshot of a critical new court ruling out of Florida. Of course, this case also comes with a few cautions for any company looking to cut its health expenses (and who isn’t these days?).

Check out the specifics of this new ruling and how you can use it to make employees and your company’s bottom line healthier.

The specifics

The employer in this case had started a wellness program in an attempt to get a handle on its health costs. A critical part of the plan: That employees complete a health risk assessment, consisting of a questionnaire and biometric screening.

That’s a common-enough practice. But the employer’s approach when someone failed to comply was a little less mainstream: It deducted $20 for every pay period that individual hadn’t done the screening or filled out the form.

One employee balked, and a class action suit followed, asserting that requiring a health risk assessment violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Participation should be voluntary, employees argued, so it was illegal to financially penalize folks for refusing to participate.

The verdict

Not so, said the court.

The ruling: If a bona fide health plan exists, medical info can be collected. And a wellness program counts as part of a health plan. Which means that collecting data via health risk assessment doesn’t violate the ADA, and requiring them to comply doesn’t step out of bounds.

The learning for employers

This ruling is great news for every cost-conscious employer out there. Wellness programs remain one of the only strategies proven to lower healthcare costs.

So any tool at your disposal that can get more people participating is worthwhile. While some employers have done well by offering incentives for employees who participate, there are times when the opposite approach may nab the results you’re after. And now you can be more confident it’s a legal strategy.

However, nothing’s ever that neat and tidy. This verdict was strictly one court’s opinion. But you have plenty of  laws and agencies to worry about running afoul of: HIPAA, The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) and the EEOC.

So when crafting your organization’s wellness plan, and how you’ll get employees to take part, you’ll need to watch all of these. And while the EEOC, for one, hasn’t ruled on the voluntary nature of health risk assessments, informally it has said requiring them would violate the ADA. But will they take an official stance soon in light of this new ruling?

Stay tuned.

Cite: Seff v. Broward County.

Wellness programs are no passing fad – they’re one of the few strategies companies have consistently embraced to chip away at high healthcare costs in recent years.

One major flaw with wellness programs? The payoff is often slow to see. And that makes it tough to justify pumping a ton of money into wellness initiatives, when it could take years to see the fruits of the efforts.

Still, companies should want to dedicate dollars to this healthcare savings strategy.

To get an idea of how much other companies are spending to get employees healthier – and just what they’re spending on, take a look at these new benchmarks from Buck Consultants.

The magic number: 220

Certainly you don’t want to overspend on your wellness program, no matter how formal or informal it is at this point. But underspending could rob you of payoff, too.

To hit upon the happy medium, compare what you currently spend on wellness to this: On average, companies paid $220 per employee for wellness last year. That’s a big jump from the $163 they forked over in 2009 says Buck Consultants.

If your number is significantly higher than that, you’re one of the few – a scant 11% of companies spend more than $500 on wellness per person annually.

So what’s worth spending on?

Since your company is going to end up opening its wallet anyway, why not direct the dollars in the most fruitful ways possible? The three most popular, according to Buck:

• gifts or merchandise to reward employees for healthy behaviors (49%)
• discounts and subsidies for preventative health services, like annual physicals (49%), and
• raffles or prize drawings in health-driven contests or competitions (47%).

The law prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals based on personal genetic information. That seems reasonable.

But here’s the rub: GINA rules could affect the kind of info your health plan can collect as part of a wellness program health risk assessment (HRA).

Under the new law, companies that give wellness program participants a break on plan premiums can’t collect family health history info as part of an HRA.

So you’re stuck. Without a family history, risk assessments lack an essential diagnostic tool. If you offer HRA’s without an incentive like a premium reduction, you’ll probably have fewer people willing to go through the assessment process. Either way, your wellness program could be significantly less effective overall.

For a look at how the new GINA rules could affect your wellness program, go here.