Interactive Health is well on its way to disproving the law of averages.

I’ve never, ever, seen them get the facts straight. This is a very hard feat to accomplish. Just randomly — or by hiring someone who might know a friend smart enough to do searches on the internet — you’d think they could stumble into an accurate statement every so often. In the immortal words of the great philosopher Rick Perry, even a stopped clock is right once a day. But we’re talking about an outfit that can’t tell the difference between a chair and a cigarette, and, speaking of cigarettes, ran a “smoking recession program.”

They also recently wrote that employers should run batteries of medical tests on their youngest and healthiest employees. Due to the likely harms of overdiagnosis and overtreatment, this “protocol” is directly contrary to what the US Preventive Services Task Force, Society of General Internal Medicine, Choosing Wisely and most recently Consumer Reports advise.  But what do all those organizations know? Have they ever diagnosed an 80-pound adult as having weight in a “healthy range”? No, but someone at Interactive Health was able to figure that out without even needing to consult any outside experts.

Can Interactive Health spell EEOC?

On Tuesday (12/11), I conducted a very successful and extremely well-attended webinar for the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health, on the upcoming EEOC wellness rule change, and how to make lemonade out of that lemon, which turns out to be spectacularly easy.

An attendee wrote to me to note that a vendor had said exactly the opposite of what I said about the EEOC rule change — that it was no big deal and that employers need only be “compliant with existing regulations.” I replied that, with everything that has been published by me and others explaining the decision in lay terms, no vendor could possibly be that stupid. But after the person disclosed that the vendor in question was Interactive Health, I immediately apologized and asked for the link, which he sent:

Here is a line-by-line deconstruction of their misinformation:

“The EEOC could…reissue the same regulations but provide more appropriate justification for why a 30% incentive is reasonable and voluntary…”

The judge said the opposite: “AARP vs. EEOC’s decision means that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must rewrite its definition of “voluntary” to achieve consistency with the dictionary definition.” He was quite clear that forcing employees to choose between (1) suffering a 30% financial forfeiture and (2) having the stuffing screened inappropriately screened out of them by an unlicensed wellness vendor isn’t the slightest bit “reasonable or voluntary.”

Further, if anyone at Interactive Health could find someone smart enough to actually read the EEOC’s January motion, that person could explain to Interactive Health that the EEOC eventually acknowledged that the judge was right. (“The ADA regulation will still require that participation in wellness programs to be voluntary.”)

Even if they hadn’t agreed, it wouldn’t matter. If the judge says you can’t write rules allowing 30% penalties, it’s not OK to then write rules allowing 30% penalties. That’s why we have a judicial system. To determine what is OK and what’s not OK. A simple concept, covered in eighth-grade civics. Surely someone at Interactive Health has a friend somewhere who is smart enough to find someone who can explain that concept to them.

Interactive’s very stable genius is most on display with this advice:

Generally, employees must be offered choices for earning financial incentives. This includes the opportunity to pursue a reasonable alternative if the individual can establish with their personal physician or an allied health professional that the choices offered by the program are not reasonable for the employee due to a health condition.

They say in the stock market, no one is as valuable as the person who is always right except the person who is always wrong, and indeed Interactive Health has inadvertently created a teachable moment.

Here goes. The “reasonable alternative standard” is an Affordable Care Act construct. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the decision in AARP v. EEOC, which defined “voluntary” as written in the Americans with Disabilities Act (and the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act). If you did exactly what Interactive Health is suggesting to “comply” with this ruling, you shouldn’t even bother showing up at the trial if you get sued. Just send a check to the plaintiff.

The reason? The decision in AARP v. EEOC — and the ADA and GINA themselves– address specifically involuntary clinical wellness programs. According to those statutes, any “clinical exam or inquiry” must be voluntary. Large fines (or withheld incentives) are anything but voluntary. In their language above, Interactive Health is proposing replacing one involuntary clinical exam (by them) with another involuntary clinical exam (by a doctor) to determine that the first involuntary clinical exam would not be appropriate, and therefore the employee needs to be presented with yet another type of involuntary clinical exam as an alternative. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

To summarize, someone at Interactive Health needs to find someone smart enough to explain to the company’s employees that replacing one inappropriate test with another will not suffice to comply with a court order that says you can’t perform inappropriate tests.

Someone needs to step up. The good news is, we know there’s at least one adult in the room — that big, strapping 80-pounder.