The Potential of an Online and Mobile Health Scorecard for Preventing Chronic Disease

Abstract

This article proposes a digital or electronic health scorecard to help prevent chronic disease. Today, chronic diseases—such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer—are among the most prevalent, costly, and preventable of all health problems. Yet, no credible, broadly distributed tool exists for monitoring and promoting health of large populations. The Take Care scorecard, we propose, will be a parsimonious way to both convey to people what measures they need to take to maintain their health and prevent or control chronic disease. The scorecard will aggregate several health and lifestyle indicators, such as blood pressure, body mass index, smoking and exercising, and allow the person to score him- or herself, coming up with a single number that assesses where he or she stands in terms of health. The terms used in the scorecard are easily comprehended by laypeople and are intended for usage that is not necessarily mediated by a physician, although it can be easily applied in the clinical setting. The measures included in the scorecard were selected on the basis of converging medical evidence attesting to their significance in curbing chronic disease. While the scorecard can also be used in a pen-and-paper manner, the increasing global popularity and accessibility of online and mobile content makes such a scorecard a potentially powerful and cost-effective means of increasing health.

Acknowledgments

The opinions expressed and the data communicated in this paper are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Economic Forum or of all the members of the Global Agenda Council on Non-Communicable Diseases.

The authors acknowledge Stephanie Gati, former Global Health intern at Johnson & Johnson and current student at Princeton University, for her help in completing this article.

Notes

Note. NIH = National Institutes of Health (2009); AHA = American Heart Association (2009); Mayo = Mayo Clinic (2009); ACC = American College of Cardiology (2010a, 2010b); HMS = Harvard Medical School (2010). LDL = low-density lipoprotein; HDL = high-density lipoprotein; BMI = body mass index.