The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) and eClinicalWorks today announced that new lifestyle medicine tools will be available within the eClinicalWorks electronic health record (EHR) 12.0.4, helping clinicians more seamlessly incorporate evidence-based lifestyle interventions into routine patient care.
The tools are designed to support the implementation of lifestyle medicine within clinicians' existing workflows, from assessing patients and documenting lifestyle medicine interventions to providing patient education and tracking clinical outcomes over time.
The new lifestyle medicine capabilities include:
- The Lifestyle Medicine Whole Person Health Assessment, a comprehensive assessment tool of patient lifestyle factors across nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, connectedness and avoidance of risky substances.
- A lifestyle medicine progress note template, enabling clinicians to document prescribed interventions and patient goals, including food as medicine interventions such as produce prescriptions and medically tailored groceries and meals.
- Lifestyle medicine dashboards and reports to help clinicians track, trend and report patient outcomes related to lifestyle medicine interventions.
- Lifestyle medicine flowsheets that make it easier to monitor relevant clinical measures and patient progress over time.
- Group or shared medical appointment functionality to support delivery of lifestyle medicine using a group-based model of care.
- Patient education messaging templates that clinicians can use to share lifestyle medicine information and resources with patients.
The tools can support the achievement of value-based care goals and work alongside existing eClinicalWorks capabilities for remote patient monitoring, chronic care management and clinical quality measure tracking, giving care teams additional ways to follow patients between visits and support ongoing chronic disease care.
Successfully implementing lifestyle medicine in clinical practice requires making it part of clinicians' everyday workflows. Clinicians need practical tools that fit within the systems they already use. By integrating lifestyle medicine assessment, documentation, patient education and outcomes tracking directly into the EHR workflow, we can help clinicians move from recognizing the importance of healthy lifestyle behaviors to systematically addressing them with their patients."
Kaitlyn Pauly, MS, RD, DipACLM, ACLM Chief Integration Officer
The integration has particular potential for outpatient settings and community health centers, where eClinicalWorks is widely used and where comprehensive approaches to prevention and chronic disease care can have significant impact.
"Healthcare organizations are increasingly focused on prevention, whole-person care, and improving long-term outcomes," said Girish Navani, CEO and cofounder of eClinicalWorks. "Through this collaboration with ACLM, eClinicalWorks is embedding lifestyle medicine directly into the clinical workflow, giving providers practical tools to assess patient needs, document interventions, educate patients, and track progress over time. Together, we are helping make evidence-based lifestyle medicine more accessible, actionable, and scalable across the healthcare continuum."
At Albany Area Primary Health Care in Georgia, Will Koopal, PA-C, DipACLM, knows firsthand the challenges of delivering lifestyle medicine programs when key pieces of the workflow require manual coordination.
"Lifestyle medicine shouldn't have to operate as something separate from primary care," Koopal said. "We're already connecting patients with programs such as FreshRx through eClinicalWorks, but much of what happens afterward requires manual coordination among clinicians and staff to manage scheduling, billing and patient outcomes. Having these tools integrated into the EHR can make it much easier to follow participation and engagement and see changes in measures, such as A1c and blood pressure."
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