If you’re an HR or benefits leader, you’ve almost certainly seen biometric screenings on a vendor proposal at some point. Maybe you’ve offered them. Maybe you’ve quietly cut them when budgets tightened. Maybe they live in a folder somewhere — once a year, an HR coordinator schedules the vendor to come on-site, employees line up for finger sticks, and the data goes into a portal nobody opens again.
If that’s roughly your experience, you’ve seen the standalone biometric screening industry exactly as it’s been built. And you’ve also seen why most employers stop doing them.
What standalone screenings actually deliver
A typical standalone biometric program runs $40-$75 per employee, screens for the basics — BP, A1C, lipid panel, BMI, sometimes nicotine — and produces a population-level report. The data feeds into a wellness vendor’s risk-stratification engine. Employees may or may not see their own numbers in a clear way.
The problem isn’t the data. The problem is that there’s no clinical infrastructure attached to it. An A1C of 6.4 sitting in a vendor portal does nothing. An A1C of 6.4 followed up by a primary care visit, a lifestyle conversation, and possibly a prescription does a lot.
Standalone screenings without a clinic generate findings without follow-through. That’s the source of most of the “we cut biometrics” decisions.
What screenings inside a clinic look like
When biometric screenings are run inside an onsite primary care program, the unit economics change. The screening itself is bundled into the existing clinic operations — point-of-care lab equipment, an NP who does the draw and reviews the results in the same visit, an EHR that flags abnormal findings. The marginal cost is small. The clinical follow-through is built in.
This is why “biometric screenings” as a benefits line item often makes sense for employers with onsite care and rarely makes sense for employers without it. The screening is only useful in proportion to the clinical action it produces.
How we think about it
For Archer-managed populations, screenings happen as part of the annual physical — same NP, same EHR, same continuity. Findings go into the member’s record. Abnormal results get a follow-up visit on the calendar before the patient leaves the room. Aggregate data feeds population-level risk reporting for the employer.
The cost is folded into the monthly fee. The output is real intervention, not a vendor PDF.