About 300 Iowa elementary school students and their parents received a homework assignment over the holidays: fill out an online health assessment.

Families in six rural districts across the state are being asked to fill out the assessments as part of the Wellness for Youth program, a project coordinated by the Wellness Council of Iowa through a $57,000 grant from the Wellmark Foundation.

“What we’re trying to do is get a baseline assessment of student behavior related to their health,” said Kerry Juhl, the Wellness Council’s executive director. “Next semester we’ll be providing tools and resources for their teachers to integrate health-related messages into the curriculum they’re already teaching.”

Additionally, students and teachers will receive incentives for participating in a walking program, and parents will receive educational materials throughout the school year. The students will then respond to a follow-up health assessment next year.

The program, which may later be adopted statewide, is one example of the types of health assessments developed by Protocol Driven Healthcare Inc. The company relocated its computer network operations from New Jersey to Des Moines a year and a half ago after receiving a $750,000 incentive package from the Grow Iowa Values Fund and the city of Des Moines.

A start-up company that’s also backed by Silicon Valley-based Acuity Ventures, PDHI is probably within 18 months of reaching profitability, said Lee Penn II, the company’s chief financial officer. PDHI, which has pledged to create 48 jobs with salaries averaging $70,000 per year by July 2007, recently hired its first Iowa resident, its customer service project manager, after transferring two key people from New Jersey in 2004. It expects to begin hiring programmers this year.

Despite a slower-than-expected ramp-up in hiring, “we’re very pleased with where we are right now,” Penn said. “We would have liked to have it happen sooner, but this is good stuff.”

Moving its data center to Des Moines has already enabled the company to save more than 50 percent in lease costs for server space, and its office space expenses have been similarly reduced, Penn said.

“The support that we received from the Iowa Values Fund was important to us being able to last this long,” he said, “and to be able to work with managed-care companies that have already decided they want to move in this direction.”

Among PDHI’s corporate clients is Intracorp, a Philadelphia-based health management company owned by CIGNA Corp. PDHI recently completed an online risk assessment of Intracorp’s 76,000 members, of whom about 54,000 participated.

“The whole idea is that if someone has a high-risk behavior, you want to change that to low-risk behaviors,” Penn said. “We provide the tools to effectively identify those who are going to produce the biggest benefit for themselves and the program.”

Overall, PDHI completed approximately 150,000 health risk assessments in 2005 for its clients, which include eight other health management plans across the country.

Another PDHI partner is StayWell Electronic Health Publishing, a St. Paul-based health management services company. StayWell provides health information to PDHI, and PDHI in turn performs health risk assessments for StayWell’s clients, “so it’s a two-way reselling partnership,” Penn said.

In Iowa, PDHI is working with the Iowa Department of Human Services to implement a health assessment process for the Medicaid program that was mandated by the Legislature last year. By performing assessments of all Medicaid clients, the program will be better able to identify people that need particular programs, such as smoking cessation classes, to improve their health, Penn said.

PDHI is also working on a pilot program with Hy-Vee Inc. for an online software application its pharmacists can use to better track medications for their Medicaid customers. The program is designed to help pharmacists provide medication therapy management services, which are mandated under the new Medicare Part D program approved by Congress last year.

PDHI is even looking at potential services it might deliver to the Greater Des Moines Partnership to enhance the Partnership’s Buy Into the Circle campaign, in which companies are asked to redirect 5 percent of their business-to-business purchases to local companies.

“One way may be for employers to use our system to identify (health) programs or services needed by their employees, and then match them with services offered by companies within the Des Moines area,” Penn said.