What's Your Health Age? A Health Risk Assessment for Veterans

Abstract

The presentation will discuss the VHA's experiences in developing and implementing an online health risk assessment customized for the unique needs of Veterans. This application is called the healtheliving assessment (HLA) and launched March, 2014. The HLA is available to all registered users of the My HealtheVet personal health portal. The Veteran is asked a structured set of questions about health habits such as diet, physical activity, and tobacco use, as well as personal and family health history. The tool uses underlying branching logic to personalize the set of questions for each Veteran. Using clinical and mathematical algorithms, the HLA generates a tailored report that assesses current health status and calculates risk of several major diseases. A metric called Health Age is calculated to summarize overall health status. A Health Age older than the chronological age indicates a need for many healthy changes, while a Health Age younger than chronological age indicates a healthy lifestyle.