Wellness data generated by patients using smart phones and portable devices can be a key part of Personal Health Record (PHR) data and offers healthcare service providers (healthcare providers) patient health information on a daily basis. Prior research has identified the potential for improved communication between healthcare provider and patient. However the practice of sharing patient genera...

BACKGROUND In 2006, all local education agencies in the United States participating in federal school meal programs were required to establish school wellness policies. This study documented the strength and comprehensiveness of 1 state's written district policies using a coding tool, and tested whether these traits predicted school-level implementation and practices. METHODS School wellness ...

Monitoring and modeling biomedical, health care and wellness data from individuals and converging data on a population scale have tremendous potential to improve understanding of the transition to the healthy state of human physiology to disease setting. Wellness monitoring devices and companion software applications capable of generating alerts and sharing data with health care providers or so...

An interoperation study, WellnessRules, is described, where rules about wellness opportunities are created by participants in rule languages such as Prolog and N3, and translated within a wellness community using RuleML/XML. The wellness rules are centered around participants, as profiles, encoding knowledge about their activities conditional on the season, the time-of-day, the weather, etc. Th...

Organizational wellness programs are on or off-site services sponsored by organizations which attempt to promote good health or to identify and correct potential health related problems (Wolfe, Parker, & Napier, 1994). The authors conducted a meta-analysis on studies that examined the effects of participation in an organizational wellness program (fitness or comprehensive) on absenteeism and jo...

Public health in the United States can be improved by building workplace "cultures of health" that support healthy lifestyles. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes the Prevention and Public Health Fund, will support a new focus on prevention and wellness, offering opportunities to strengthen the public's health through workplace wellness initiatives. This article describes the opportun...

Increasingly, corporate health promotion programs are implementing wellness programs integrating principles of behavioral economics. Employees of a large firm were provided a customized online incentive program to design their own commitments to meet health goals. This study examines patterns of program participation and engagement in health promotion activities. Subjects were US-based employee...

Background. Physician wellness is a vital element of a well-functioning health care system. Not only is physician wellness empirically associated with quality and patient outcomes, but its ramifications span individual, interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. The purpose of this study was to explore academic physicians' perceptions about their work-related wellness, including the fo...

Medically referred wellness coaching clients may present thinking patterns that generate internal resistance to change, including lack of urgency, inadequate incentives, and uncertainty about what they need to do differently.(1) Applying the Wellcoaches (Wellcoaches Corp, Wellesley, Massachusetts) model interventions within a framework of the four domains of learning (cognitive, affective, beha...

This article investigates the characteristics of workplace wellness programs, their prevalence, their impact on employee health and medical cost, facilitators of their success, and the role of incentives in such programs. The authors employ four data collection and analysis streams: a review of the scientific and trade literature, a national survey of employers, a longitudinal analysis of medic...