Health Risk Appraisal
Data Analytics
The goal of
United States Army's Health Promotion Program are to enhance
military readiness and work performance through implementation of a
health promotion program that improves the quality of life for all
soldiers, civilians employed by the Army, family members and
retirees. As part of the health promotion program collects
data annually, which constitute one of the largest health promotion
database in the world, known as a Health Risk Appraisal (HRA)
Corporate database.
Over a two-year period, Dr. Rao
and his team performed one of the most extensive data analytics
project on the clinical and health promotion data elements
covering over 650,000 individual records on health risk data in the
HRA system (under contract to SAIC).
The data analytics goals
of Dr. Rao's team was to (a) evaluate the accomplishment of health
promotion programs measured as attainment of selected health
promotion and disease prevention objectives and (b) perform
detailed analytics of the prevailing pattern of health promotion
behaviors in the study population.
With over 650,000
individual records covering a study period of give years (1991-95),
HRA is the largest health promotion database in the world.
For the purposes of the study, Dr. Rao and his team selected 89
data fields from each record of which 61 were health and wellness
and clinical data related entries. A total of 41 data
elements were selected from the 61 entries for the
analysis.
Data analytics covered
over 650,000 individual records and over 21 million health and
wellness related data points. U.S. Army Health
Promotion reported this study as the largest analytics performed
thus far on the health risk appraisal database.
Dr. Rao's study provided
for the first time a comprehensive analytical basis to study the
Army policies and programs on health
promotion.
As part of the analytics
model, Dr. Rao developed unique data representation methods to
illustrate trends in a study population as large as 650,000
spanning over a period of 5 years.
Additionally, the analytics
adopted national standard measures for health promotion and
wellness and constructed a health and wellness index as a
baseline to trends in health-related behaviors and clinical
measurements in the HRA population.
Dr. Rao and his team
performed multiple regression analysis for clinical as well as
health promotion related dependent (outcome) variables associated
with prevalent trend in health-behavior (independent)
variables.
For the first time, a
health promotion index was used as an outcome measurement for
health risk factors such as prevalence of overweight, elevated
cholesterol levels, and hypertension in population groups.
