Increasing Personal Wellness through Community Portal

The awareness on personal wellness has transformed the concept of healthcare. Personal wellness has shifted the concept from treatment of diseases to prevention and management of chronic diseases.  Community wellness portals are playing an active role in advocating to people about getting more health conscious and enabling them to get engaged in their own healthcare activities in order to manage their chronic diseases on their own.

In today's digital world, wellness information is not restrained to caregivers or physicians. Many healthcare providers are starting outpatient portal solution for hospitals to help patients to meet the demand for wellness therapies and relevant education material to manage their own healthcare.

A wellness community portal performs various important functions which contribute to bringing awareness among people on various health care programs and initiatives at a national level. Some of these functions are:

• To encourage employers to enhance employees' personal and professional productivity, and their physical and mental well-being, to foster a worksite culture that supports employees to make healthy lifestyle choices.
• To promote and support programs that encourages the wellness of employees.
• Encourage habits of wellness and increase awareness of factors and resources contributing to well-being of people
• To promote general health of children at home and school
• To promote rural healthcare

To encourage healthier behavior across the nation, such wellness communities propagate and promote various wellness programs that are often tailored to serve the specific requirement of a particular community or area. iHealthConnect is a comprehensive mobile integrated, cloud based Patient Wellness Software that involves a multi-pronged approach. It focuses on wellness of patients, prevention and self-management of chronic diseases, longitudinal health and influencing patient adherence to care plans.

Significance of Having Wellness Community Portal

The Wellness Community Portal aims to provide integrated programs, information and resources that promote quality of life and cultivate a culture of health, wellbeing and balance. The term wellness implies more than just free from illnesses, in fact it is a process of growth and, change in behavior and lifestyle. The process of wellness have many interrelated elements such as physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, environmental, and occupational.

Nowadays, organizations are keen to build wellness community portal for their employees and stakeholders after receiving directives from the United States Department of Labor and the United States Department of Health and Human Services. These two government bodies sponsor many workplace wellness programs, which are intended to gain insight about the prevalence of the lifestyle diseases among the workforce, the impact of wellness programs and the use of financial incentives by the government in these programs.

The burden of chronic disease is growing in the United States. The rising rates of obesity and physical inactivity are causing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. These diseases are affecting mainly the young age working class, which in turn is hampering the productivity of businesses. To counter this growing problem, employers are adopting health promotion and disease prevention strategies. These strategies include, change in the working environment such as providing healthy food options in the cafeteria, comprehensive interventions that support employees in adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyles. The Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act (Affordable Care Act) supports these initiatives with a number of provisions given in order to leverage workplace health promotion and prevention of lifestyle diseases.

iHealthConnect  is a comprehensive mobile integrated, cloud based software which enables providers to build a robust patient portal for healthcare communities. It allows providers, insurers, employers and caregivers to create vibrant communities for patients.  Providers can achieve a multi-pronged strategy that includes engaging patients meaningfully and boosting productivity through process automation, actionable analytics and cost optimization.