Highlights
- The platform evaluates a wellness score through health risk assessment using data from wearable devices and mobile apps.
- Assessment questions are measured against categories like physical aspects, lifestyle, medical and family history, diet, and nutrition.
- Based on the scores, the tool recommends health programs and insurance services best suited to the user.
In this article
In this article
A wellness platform
The platform is designed to assess an employee’s health and make recommendations or offer healthcare advice after it calculates an individual’s health score.
Wellness is projected to be a $7 trillion market by 2025. Employers must promote a healthier and productive work environment by offering employees the tools to take control of their wellness. Such initiatives will help boost productivity, reduce healthcare risks and costs, increase job satisfaction, and employee retention.
This paper proposes a holistic wellness platform to improve health and reduce risks, moving toward achieving individual well-being and sustainability at the workplace. Customizing a platform to an individual’s physical and emotional parameters provides a clear picture of one’s wellness vis-à-vis their peers’ demographics and comorbidity. The platform calculates a personalized wellness score using customized clinical knowledge and insights, and acts as a readily accessible aid to manage the overall wellness goals of an individual.
Why count your steps
Quantifying health for a unified and consistent approach toward wellness.
Wellness is measured against demographic and lifestyle markers to aid preventive care and help people stay healthy. A wellness platform must be built on quantitative health evaluation, customized to individuals’ medical history and demographics. The goal is to provide users with a unified and consistent approach toward wellness.
Key elements essential in a robust wellness platform for quantifying health include:
Reliable scoring: It’s important to leverage a model that considers multi-dimensional data to provide a credible score and deliver personalized wellness alerts that keep participants on track.
Digital data collection: Seamless data collection protocols are critical to maximizing automated data collection from mobile apps and wearable devices.
Data security: As the healthcare ecosystem becomes more interconnected, enabling data security and privacy using consent sharing, ensuring the immutability of records, and integrating existing enterprise applications are crucial.
Holistic assessment: For a wellness platform to be effective, it must blend several elements, such as the user’s physiology, behavior, comorbidity, history, and life measurements, into a single, unified, and normalized score.
A wellness platform must encourage individual participation in curated health-oriented lifestyle programs and health-improvement tasks, such as walking 10,000 steps daily—after considering medical fitness, to quantify health parameters.
Evaluating wellness
Wearable devices and mobile apps make it easier to analyze data for health risk assessments.
The designed platform asks questions to arrive at a wellness score based on categories such as physical (age, gender, height, weight, vitals, heart health, and the like), lifestyle (exercise and activity level, food, sleep habits), and medical and family history. An individual’s well-being encompasses these multidimensional aspects, including diet and nutrition—essential to assess their interdependence to measure one’s wellness.
Moreover, maintaining an individual’s health and wellness goals must be a continuous effort and not something to be considered only when one falls sick. Also, wellness is heterogeneous when it comes to demographic groups. For instance, a person over 50 years or with a cardiac history in the family could be more prone to illness than a 30-year-old with no medical history. For this reason, a wellness platform considers the target population as a cluster of different subgroups with varying risk factors.
Considering all these aspects, wearable devices make collecting real-time data on varied health parameters easier today. The wellness platform integrates with wearable devices such as fitness watches to pull vital stats to assess an individual’s fitness level. The data collected from wearable devices and mobile apps enable the health risk assessment after establishing a baseline when the user joins the platform.
Category-wise scores obtained allow the tool to recommend health programs and insurance services best suited to the user.
The proposed platform promotes a cohesive approach to the patient journey by incorporating relevant stakeholders and addressing multiple areas of well-being.
A holistic wellness app with multi-pronged benefits
Building an integrated application that is flexible and configurable to your needs and objectives.
Technology-driven platforms seamlessly scale wellness programs and services across global locations. They customize recommendations and programs to user sub-groups and generate in-depth reports at the individual and enterprise levels.
The wellness platform provides an overall wellness score and scores for each category. Any unusual score is highlighted, and an alarm is raised. Using these scores, employers can offer access to relevant wellness programs and services and incentivize individuals through a well-designed reward system. These programs can either be individual, enterprise, or government driven.
The platform evaluates wellness scores based on the data collected from wearable devices, helping employers recommend and offer healthcare programs, services, and rewards to employees for their well-being.
Marathon training, for instance, is an individual-driven program in which a health-conscious person can participate in a program of their choice to improve one’s health and maintain fitness levels. In return, they get rewards with redeemable loyalty points offered by the employer or insurance provider.
Likewise, in a government/enterprise-driven program, such as prevention of non-communicable diseases, the healthcare organizer or incentive provider can benefit from the improved health of their citizens and workers. This could be through increased productivity, lower healthcare expenses, reduced stress on civic health services, and an increased desire to achieve organizational and national goals.
The platform allows users to configure the application based on their objectives (marathon training) or enterprises to define goals such as diabetes control practices). The wellness parameters are measured through wearable and sensor devices (motion or video) or captured manually. Automation helps customize the program based on the expected outcomes from the users and offers suggestions by categories or personalized recommendations consequent to the scores obtained.
Here’s a list of health programs and services that could be integrated as part of the recommended system.
Leveraging technology to build a culture of health
The wellness platform will help employees regularly track their physical, mental, nutritional, and other parameters from the comfort of their homes. The correlation between improved wellness and lower healthcare costs opens doors to a new purpose-driven collaboration between people and organizations (private, public, and government). Forward-looking organizations that offer coordinated wellness programs can drive transformative and lasting change using technology to build a culture of health.
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