Just in time for open-enrollment season, a new federal regulation will make it illegal for a health insurer to request an insured’s family medical history or link it to financial incentives or penalties on health benefits for employers or individuals.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), passed in 2007, prohibits use of genetic information to discriminate against employees. Regulations unveiled last month now impose restrictions on use of family medical histories, commonly collected as part of health-risk assessments that ask about things like weight, frequency of exercise, blood pressure, smoking, and other health-related conditions and have been used to help insurance companies underwrite group plans and target particular conditions for corporate-wellness programs.

The regulations take effect December 7. Penalty for noncompliance is $100 per day per affected employee.

The upshot of the new regulation is that it will force many employers to rethink how they structure health and wellness plans, as many conduct open enrollments this week and next.

Some employers will have to scrub family medical history questions out of health-risk assessments and restructure health benefits so they don’t link health-risk assessments to financial penalties and incentives. Others may have to rescore individual health assessments after eliminating information originally gathered by family medical histories or change their wellness and chronic-disease-management programs, which may be based on health-risk assessments.

“Employers are going to have to be very careful when it comes to asking about family medical history in the context of family health plan coverage,” said Russell Gully in Thompson & Knight’s Dallas office. “And if they ask for it, the potential for misuse is very high, so many employers could decide…it’s better to just stay away from it altogether.”

Dallas-based Clampitt Paper Co., which has about 215 employees, will offer a wellness program through United Healthcare next year and factored in the implications of the new law in developing its program, said Ellen Bath, Clampitt’s human resources manager.

The law will not significantly affect the company’s ability to provide health benefits, but it could hinder its ability to help employees manage their health risks through targeted wellness programs.

“If an employee is predetermined to be susceptible to cancer,” Bath said, “you have to know about that to take the necessary precautions to prevent that.”

Christian Moreno, vice president of Cooper Corporate Solutions, the group-benefits consulting arm of Cooper Aerobics Center, said the law is requiring nearly all of its corporate clients to revamp their health-risk assessments to eliminate family history questions and unlink them with their wellness incentives programs.

Mark Head, chief solutions officer for Viverae Inc., a corporate-wellness consultant, estimates that upward of 75 to 85 percent of employers include family medical history questions in their health-risk assessment tools or use such histories to link an employee’s participation in these types of risk assessments to wellness rewards or penalties.

Head contends the new law hamstrings companies’ ability to collect more extensive information to help design wellness programs.

As a matter of practice, Viverae does not ask for family medical histories in its health-risk assessments at the time of a client company’s enrollment. Instead, it gathers that information in supplementary surveys when offering individual health coaching, for instance. That is still allowed within the new rules.

Head believes the new law, which is intended to protect employee privacy and prohibit the use of genetic information to discriminate against employees, should not have been extended to include prohibitions on the use of family medical histories.

“I am all in support of nondiscrimination,” Head said, “but we have to find a way to make people more accountable. We have to balance the financial responsibility of the company with the personal responsibility of the member.”

Here’s how to make sure your company is in compliance:

• Conduct an audit of your wellness program.

• Large employers should review their Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) plan document and their wellness program structure to ensure both comply with the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.