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“More and more companies are implementing wellness programs to foster healthier workforces, from smoking-cessation coaching to weight-loss plans. But to design such programs effectively, employers need to know a lot about the health of each of their workers, so they can figure out where the greatest needs for improvement exist,” according to Knowledge@Wharton.

“Toward that end, most large companies are now asking employees to complete health risk assessments (HRAs) — questionnaires that ask workers to reveal such details as their weight, blood pressure and family history of disease. Experts agree that the HRA can be a useful tool, but only if employees actually bother to fill it out. To increase HRA completion rates, firms have tried a variety of financial incentives, including gift certificates, contributions to medical savings accounts and cash rewards. In some cases, employers have even resorted to promising health-plan premium discounts of $1,500 to $2,000 a year to employees who fill out an HRA.”

“According to Wharton health care management professor Kevin Volpp, employers shouldn’t have to use that much money to increase HRA completion rates. In a study published last year in the American Journal of Health Promotion, Volpp and three co-authors — Emily Haisley from Barclays Wealth, Thomas Pellathy from McKinsey and George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon University — examined one potential method for making small financial incentives more effective: a lottery system that gives teams of employees the chance to increase their rewards by boosting their whole group’s HRA completion rate.”

Said Volpp: “Not surprisingly, there’s a relationship between the amount of the incentive and the rate at which people do the HRAs. What we did in this study was look at a way to get more bang for the buck — to get higher rates of completion for the same amount of money.”

Read the entire study here.