Individual Health Needs Assessment Tools

Given the rising costs of health care, it is easy to estimate how demographic changes and expensive medical advances will continue that trend. Therefore, to optimize resource utilization by monitoring and assessing your health needs, individual health needs assessment tools will be important in not only helping offset rising health care costs, but also to help stem diet-related health conditions.

Body Mass Index Calculator

• Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measure of body fat based on your weight and height that applies to adult men and women. The BMI calculator estimates your body fat and can be found online and on mobile applications. BMI tables are also used as a gauge of your risks to certain diseases associated with increased body fat. For instance, your high BMI index may put you at great risk of Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, breathing problems, gallstones, heart disease and certain type of cancers. A BMI score less than 18.5 implies you are underweight, between 18.5 and 24.9 shows you have a normal body mass, 25.0 and 29.9 means you are overweight while a BMI index of 30 and above indicates that you are obese.

MyPyramid Tracker

• It is an interactive online tool that will help you track your food intake. What you need to do is to search for foods and beverages that you want to eat in your online "MyPyramid" menu. This makes it easy to prepare healthy and economical meals at home. With this tool, you are in a position to eliminate from your diet foods with high glycemic index, unsaturated cholesterol "bad fat" and those that cause abdominal discomfort. Hence, the risk of heart, kidney and metabolic diseases and disorders will be avoided.

Portion Distortion Quiz

• It is a tool based on the changing food portions intended for those who eat in haste at restaurants. Increase in portion sizes can result in weight gain and waistlines that predispose you to heart-related diseases. Therefore, by using Portion Distortion tool 1 and 2, you can easily know the amount of physical activities required to burn the additional calories and fat in the day's portion. With this tool, you can keep an eye on the portion sizes, especially when eating on the go.

10-Year Heart Attack Calculator

• It is an assessment calculator for estimating your 10-year risk of having a heart attack. It achieves this by using information obtained from the Framingham Heart research to predict your chance of getting a heart attack in the next 10 years. It is designed to be used by adults who are 20 years and above. To find your risk score, you must not be diabetic or with any heart-related condition. To you use this tool online, you ought to know your age, total cholesterol, high density lipid "HDL" cholesterol and systolic blood pressure reading.