Posted by Corporate Wellness | Posted in Corporate Wellness, Wellness Programs | Posted on 29-08-2010
A HRA is sometimes used paired with a health screening. An HRA is a computerized assessment tool which looks at an individual’s family history, health status, and lifestyle.
An HRA seeks to identify precursors associated with premature death or serious disease and quantifies the probable impact for each individual.
An HRA instrument is derived from an understanding of the while a disease. Based on this understanding, useful prediction instruments may be constructed to assess the health risks of an individual. Person with a higher number of health risks tend to have more serious medical problems over time.
Drawing attention to their health risks can help patrons reduce risk factors which lead to the onset of unnecessary disease and subsequent premature death.
The questionnaire covers lifestyle habits (such as tobacco use, seat belt use, and exercise) and physical measures (such as cholesterol, blood pressure levels, height, and weight).
For accuracy, it’s crucial to obtain direct measures of blood pressure, cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol. The HRA also provides recommendations and indicates what risks are modifiable. Types of measures to assess health risks are discussed under Screening Programs.
The impact of a health risk appraisal is much greater when it is given in-person, with immediate feedback to the customer. This also provides an opportunity to invite the customer’s participation in continuing health counseling and to gain their written consent to do pro-active outreach to them.
A health age may be computed based on the individual answers to the questionnaire and physiologic factors. The health age may indicate the individual to be younger or older than their chronological age.
Health Risk Appraisal (HRA) programs are one the most prolific kinds of wellness activities utilized by businesses. Continuing research on HRAs is examining the efficacy of this tool.
One of the big advantages of this tool is that it can provide an aggregate group report of a organization and can be utilized as an investigation tool.
Detailed information is available from the Society of Prospective Medicine (www.spm.org/desc.html) who publishes a handbook on HRAs.