Lifestyle Check-up
(A service to enhance health practices)

Practitioners are time poor
As a Health Practitioner you know that it is impossible to be as thorough as you would like in your consultations. If you asked your patients all the questions that are really necessary to work out the issues that are contributing to their current health problems, you would only have time to see one or two patients a day. Sadly you couldn't ever conduct a service like this so you compromise and try to cover the most pressing issues and request the tests that you think are necessary to obtain an accurate diagnosis.

Lifestyle Check-up: Evaluating your patient's Lifestyle
The way most people live their lives is  based on a combination of what their parents taught them, mixed in with bits of information that is picked up through school, the media, books and advertising. How can an average person know what is correct? The fact is that most people don't know and a great deal of what they think is correct is incorrect.

I commenced developing 'Health Questionnaires' for an NH & MRC sponsored research project on reproduction and lifestyle that we commenced in the late 1980's. The initial questionnaire was developed in conjunction with an experienced Epidemiologist and covered issues that, from the medical literature at the time, seemed to be important. We later found that the questions were quite inadequate and although we made some important findings, we missed out on a great deal of critical information. From that time onwards, I continued to use a combination of questionnaires and counselling in my quest to understand the lifestyle problems underlying fertility. In all I tested five different versions on a "Word document"  before I developed my first on-line version in 2005. I went on to develop a much more refined on-line version in 2007, which is currently available to infertile couples on ez-fertility.com.au. Recently, at UniSA, where I now work, I have been analyzing the answers to these different versions of questionnaires and have discovered that common symptoms of malaise - such as 'loss of concentration', 'fatigue', 'spots in the fingernails' and several others, actually have exceptionally strong statistical correlations with habits. Habits include different aspects of diet, intake of water, feelings of stress and so on. Not only are the symptoms a reflection of the habits but there are clusters of symptoms. It is possible to monitor a person's progress in adopting good habits by observing the improvements in their various symptoms.

The importance of malaise in reproduction and other illness
Many large studies of fertility have now shown that many fertility problems are strongly related to a self-perceived evaluation of wellness. So not only do my own studies show that couples who are infertile or who miscarry have a low wellness status but this is now generally accepted internationally. The point is that this low wellness is entirely correctable by adopting better habits.

Since the 'malaise state' underlies many or most other chronic health conditions and some acute health problems, it is important to evaluate your patients' every day habits. So since we thought that you, a busy practitioner, needed to have a simple way of evaluating lifestyle in all of your patients, we developed 'lifestyle check-up' - a product that you could implement with NO up-front costs.

How does lifestyle checkup work?
Lifestyle Check-up is an on-line service that allows all your patients to complete a questionnaire either before their first appointment from their home or in your waiting room/area. When the patient comes into the consultation, you have the results on your computer screen with all the problem areas highlighted and listed in importance. The system generates a Report which you can choose to give to your patient if you so desire. You also have the option to add your own personal comments to the Report before it is issued. Your information is completely PRIVATE and only accessible by you and your nominated staff and clinical colleagues.

Have a patient management system already? If this is the case, you can just run the check-up system alongside your existing system.

Don't have a patient management system? Lifestyle check-up provides a system for managing clinical information about your patients. However it is not an accounting or general record system.

What is the cost?
There is NO SET-UP cost. You will be charged only a small fee for each questionnaire that is processed on the system. Call Dr Judy Ford (after hours) on 08 8244 7551 for further information.