The wellness reports detail a patient's 10-year mortality risk and show how it compares with risk for the patient's peer group. The database allows the author to identify patients with common risk factors or diseases to ensure that all are receiving the proper therapies. Because it has increased patient demand for physicals, the wellness program has strengthened the practice's bottom line. To make the most of patients' HRA and exam data, transfer them into a spreadsheet or database so you can store and manipulate them. Using the techniques of prospective medicine, the author turned his annual physicals into an organized wellness program.
Patients receive customized reports of their health status and risk levels.
Patients also receive wellness plans including exercise prescriptions, caloric requirement analyses and other detailed instructions. The key to making wellness medicine work is to start small, beginning with patient education and working up to using health risk assessments and databases. So often my patients left with too little information for all the time, energy and expense that went into their exams. Test results simply accumulated in their charts, and I had no objective way to measure changes in patients' health status from year to year. I always gave lip service to prevention, but my attempts to actualize the concept were very frustrating.