Lifestyle Medicine Whole Person Health Index closes a critical gap in clinical whole-person care

An updated electronic health records-embedded assessment will help clinicians systematically capture lifestyle and whole-person health factors long missing from routine care, supporting more effective, preventive, and value-based practice.

ST. LOUIS, March 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As whole-person care accelerates across the U.S. health care system, clinicians face a persistent and consequential gap: the lifestyle and upstream health factors that drive chronic disease remain largely unmeasured, undocumented, and uncompensated in health care data systems.

To close that gap, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) has launched the Lifestyle Medicine Whole Person Health Index (LMWPHI)— a point-of-care assessment tool designed to support the delivery of whole-person care in everyday clinical practice. The LMWPHI, central to operationalizing high-quality, evidence-based, high-value care, is embedded within Epic Foundation systems nationwide, with an updated version scheduled for relaunch in May. Integration with eClinicalWorks is underway, enabling broad adoption across diverse care settings.

The LMWPHI is a brief, patient-reported assessment that can be completed before or during a patient encounter and is designed to capture behavior in the six pillars of lifestyle medicine – domains strongly associated with chronic disease risk:

• Nutrition
• Physical activity
• Sleep quality and duration
• Stress and anxiety/depression
• Substance use, including tobacco, alcohol and drug use
• Connectedness, relationships, purpose, and meaning

Whole-person care—the recognition that health outcomes are shaped by the interconnected influences of physical, mental, emotional, social, and behavioral health—has moved from an aspirational concept to a clinical and policy priority. Recent federal policy actions underscore this shift, including the creation of new payment pathways for lifestyle and prevention, such as the G0136 HCPCS code finalized in the 2026 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) for physical activity and nutrition assessment and the new MAHA ELEVATE Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation model.

Despite this progress, clinicians have lacked standardized, workflow-ready tools to systematically assess and document these upstream drivers of health in a way that supports both care delivery and emerging payment and quality frameworks.

"The interest and momentum around whole-person care is real and accelerating," said ACLM President Padmaja Patel, MD, DipABLM, FACLM, CPE, Lifestyle Medicine Intensivist. "But until now, we haven't had comprehensive tools that make this approach operational in routine clinical practice that could be tracked over time. The LMWPHI fills that void. It gives clinicians a structured, evidence-informed way to see the whole patient—not just their chief complaint—and aligns with where health care policy and payment are clearly headed."

The LMWPHI is grounded in existing validated instruments, including the Physical Activity Vital Sign, PHQ2–informed stress screening, and established sleep and dietary measures. Additionally, the tool captures motivation and readiness to change. Individual responses on the tool can be used by clinicians to focus on modifiable upstream behaviors, as well as complement traditional disease-specific measures and support preventive services such as those now recognized under the G0136 code.

The LMWPHI offers a standardized, scalable way to capture patient-reported lifestyle data that can support participation in value-based and prevention-focused models like MAHA ELEVATE, while also laying the groundwork for future lifestyle and prevention-oriented quality measures. The opportunity to integrate the LMWPHI into the EHR will enable widespread use.

"EHR integration isn't a convenience—it's what determines whether a tool actually gets used," said ACLM Chief Integration Officer Kaitlyn Pauly, MS, RD, DipACLM. "By embedding the LMWPHI directly into the systems clinicians rely on every day, we've made comprehensive whole-person lifestyle assessment immediately accessible and standardized across multiple clinical care settings."

By making whole-person health measurable, standardized, actionable, and interoperable—and by aligning with emerging payment codes, innovation models, and quality priorities—the LMWPHI represents a meaningful step toward embedding lifestyle medicine into the fabric of U.S. health care delivery. 

A free PDF version of the LMWPHI and scoring rubric is available on ACLM's Connect platform. Additional information about the Epic integration is available now, with more details on the eClinicalWorks launch coming soon.

About ACLM
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) is the nation's medical professional society advancing the field of lifestyle medicine as the foundation of a redesigned, value-based and equitable health care delivery system, essential to achieving the Quintuple Aim and whole-person health. ACLM represents, advocates for, trains, certifies, and equips its members to identify and eradicate the root cause of chronic disease by optimizing modifiable risk factors. ACLM is filling the gaping void of lifestyle medicine in medical education, providing more than 1.2 million hours of lifestyle medicine education to physicians and other health professionals since 2004, while also advancing research, clinical practice and reimbursement strategies.

SOURCE American College of Lifestyle Medicine