Every company, regardless of size or industry, is keen to demonstrate the effectiveness of their investments, especially during times of diminishing returns and shrinking profit margins. Wellness initiatives and workplace health promotion programs are no exception.

Many HR/benefits professionals struggle to demonstrate a positive return on investment for their wellness initiatives due in large part to an absence of standardized evaluation methods or measures of effectiveness. Intuitively, they know that their programs are working.

They have anecdotal proof and have seen the real difference these programs have made for their employees, but somehow the numbers just do not add up and they cannot prove a positive impact on the company's bottom line.

Indeed, as health care premiums continue to rise, benefits decisionmakers may come to the conclusion that their wellness programs have failed. That conclusion spells the doom for scores of wellness programs.

Fortunately, this kind of knee-jerk reaction can be avoided by expanding the scope of the measures used to determine the effectiveness of the individual program. It is vital to understand the link between population health and cost. This connection has to be emphasized during the program's planning phase and the corresponding matrix has to be agreed upon long before program implementation -ideally during the initial meeting at which the business case for wellness is made.

The Internet is a brilliant resource from which to draw statistics to support this point. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site states that "more than 75% of all health care dollars are spent on chronic conditions, most of which are preventable."

This isn't new information, yet only the most savvy business leaders fully understand its implications. Since health risks are the building blocks of those costly chronic conditions, the primary focus of every good wellness program should be reducing or eliminating health risks across the insured population.

The success, or lack thereof, in reducing health risks should be one of the primary measures of any wellness program. It is a better selling point and it is also easier to demonstrate than bottom-line cost savings. Why?

Even with the most effective wellness program and 100% employee and spousal active participation (which is extremely unlikely), it will take a considerable amount of time before even a small percentage of individuals with multiple health risks will be able to move into lower health risk categories. After all, many of their health issues are the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices and have accumulated over years and even decades. Reversing the process will take time.

While this transition is in progress, your company is continually in jeopardy of catastrophic claims because of potential complications of those high-risk employees.

Just hypothetically, what would happen if the year you implemented your wellness initiative, or even the year after, happened to be a year in which your insured population experienced an unusually high occurrence of catastrophic claims? The cost for providing health care would spike regardless of your wellness program's effectiveness, which would make it appear - at least on the surface - that your wellness program is not delivering the expected results.

To safeguard your wellness program and keep it from suffering a premature death for reasons that have nothing to do with its effectiveness, demonstrate that average health risks in your insured population are progressively decreasing and have strong evidence to support your claim. This will show that your wellness program is effective and will lead to reduced medical claims over time - on average, $1,038 per year for each eliminated health risk, according to a study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

Keep your wellness plan alive: Ensure senior leaders understand that reducing health risks - or even better, the change in the average health risk per employee - should be a key measurement for at least the first 12 to 36 months of your wellness program's lifespan. Call it a life insurance policy for your wellness program.

Contributing Editor Michael Puck, SPHR, is the director human resources for a midsize manufacturing company in Tennessee, author of "Healthcare Cost Management - The High Road" and the founder of www.8020wellness.com.