ST. LOUIS–As healthcare systems increasingly seek solutions to the growing burden of chronic disease, a new position statement from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) outlines a standardized approach to collecting and measuring lifestyle medicine data at the point of care.
Published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, the paper, "Optimal Data Collection in Lifestyle Medicine at the Point of Care," presents ACLM's recommendations for consistently capturing information on lifestyle behaviors, clinical outcomes, interventions, patient goals, healthcare utilization, costs, and patient experience. That standardization is essential to demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and value of lifestyle medicine within modern healthcare systems, the authors state.
"Lifestyle medicine has demonstrated tremendous potential to treat, reverse and prevent many chronic diseases, but healthcare systems cannot fully recognize, reimburse, or scale what they do not consistently measure," said ACLM President Padmaja Patel, MD, DipABLM, FACLM, CPE, FACP, Lifestyle Medicine Intensivist, a co-author on the paper. "This framework provides the foundation for capturing the data needed to demonstrate the clinical, economic, and population health impact of lifestyle medicine, helping ensure that effective care is reflected in policy, payment models, and health system decision-making."
According to the paper, lifestyle medicine's full potential has been limited by inconsistent documentation of health behaviors and lifestyle interventions across clinical settings and electronic health record systems. The paper calls for the use of standardized assessments, interoperable coding systems, and common data elements that allow information to be shared and analyzed across organizations.
The framework reflects more than six years of development involving clinicians, informatics experts, researchers, industry and health system leaders, and ACLM members. It also builds on ACLM's recent collaboration with Epic, one of the nation's leading electronic health record platforms, which has integrated ACLM-developed lifestyle medicine assessment tools into its system.
Authors say consistent data collection could help accelerate research, support quality improvement initiatives, enable benchmarking across health systems, inform reimbursement discussions, and strengthen the evidence base for lifestyle medicine interventions. The paper also highlights the role standardized data can play in supporting public health surveillance efforts.
"Robust lifestyle medicine data infrastructure will be critical," said lead author David Michael, MD, DipABLM. "Every patient encounter, whether through an in-person visit, virtual interaction, or patient-reported data, has the potential to contribute to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates how lifestyle medicine can improve lives and transform healthcare."
About ACLM®
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) is the nation's medical professional society building the infrastructure to scale lifestyle medicine as the new standard of care. ACLM translates evidence-based lifestyle interventions into education, certification, and implementation, equipping physicians, healthcare professionals, and systems of care to treat the root causes of chronic disease. Since 2004, ACLM has trained more than 100,000 health professionals and made more than 1.75 million hours of accredited continuing education available through courses and conferences for physicians and health professionals. With hundreds of institutional partners worldwide, ACLM is helping healthcare move from a system designed to manage disease to one capable of restoring health.
