Employee Wellness Plans : Health Risk Appraisal

A Health Risk Appraisal (HRA) is sometimes used in conjunction with a health evaluation. 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 illness and quantifies the probable impact for each individual.

An HRA instrument is derived from an understanding of the course of a disease. Based on this understanding, useful prediction instruments can be constructed to assess the health risks of an individual. Individuals with a higher number of health risks tend to have more weighty health issues over time.

Drawing attention to their health risks can help clients decrease risk factors which lead to the onset of unnecessary disease and subsequent premature death. The questionnaire covers lifestyle habits (such as smoking, Seat Belt use, and exercise) and physical measures (such as blood lipids, Blood Pressure levels, height, and weight).

For accuracy, it is crucial to obtain direct measures of Blood Pressure, cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol. The HRA also provides recommendations and indicates what risks are potentially modifiable. Types of measures to evaluate 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 client. This also supplies an opportunity to invite the client’s participation in continuing health counseling and to gain their written consent to do pro-active outreach to them.

A health age can 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.

HRA programs are one the most prolific types of wellness activities utilized by corporations. Continuing research on HRAs is examining the efficacy of this tool. One of the big advantages of this tool is that it can offer an aggregate group report of a business and can be utilized as an assessment tool.

Detailed information is available from the Society of Prospective Medicine (www.spm.org/desc.html) who publishes a handbook on HRAs.