An Innovative Population Health Tool for Overall Health Status Assessment: Prospective Observational Study

TL;DR

A new health assessment tool called Health Index helps identify noncommunicable disease risks by evaluating lifestyle factors and was found to be effective in early detection.

Contribution

The Health Index is a novel composite health score based on lifestyle medicine pillars for assessing and tracking health status at individual and national levels.

Findings

13.8% of 1200 targeted users completed the Health Index within a month.

85% of participants were categorized as 'At Risk' based on their health status.

Diet was identified as the most prominent health issue among participants.

Abstract

The World Health Organization reported that noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) contribute to around 74% of deaths worldwide. A similar phenomenon can also be observed in Brunei Darussalam. One of the most cost-effective approaches to control the growing burden of NCDs is to reduce related modifiable risk factors.

This study aims to propose a composite health score called Health Index, inspired by the 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine, which acts as a measure of health and can show how health changes over time at an individual and national level.

Health Index is a series of questionnaires that captures users’ health status on several domains of health and, upon completion, the users are categorized as either healthy, at risk, or in poor health. Users will also be able to view health advice based on their answers to the questionnaires.

The field testing results show Health Index as a promising population health management tool. 13.8% (166/1200) of the targeted users completed Health Index within 1 month, with 85% (1019/1200) of them in the “At Risk” category. We also identified diet as the most prominent health issue.

In conclusion, the Health Index potentially enables early detection and management of NCD risk factors to mitigate the high cost of advanced disease and complications. In the future, we aim to retrospectively and prospectively validate the Health Index through several statistical analyses.

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