OBJECTIVES: The Whole Health (WH) Model is an innovative holistic model that centers around “what is important to the person” rather than the disease-driven approach that focuses more on the disease than the person. The WH model identifies several dimensions to personalized whole health including sleep, nutrition, movement, emotional health, and mind-body therapies. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been a pioneer in implementing the WH model with studies on Veterans within the VA system showing promise of improved outcomes. However, studies in the general population are lacking. This study investigated the availability of measures related to each of the dimension of WH model in eight nationally representative datasets.

METHODS: The eight national datasets examined for this study were: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey(NHANES),Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System(BRFSS),Medical Expenditure Panel(MEPS), National Health Interview Survey(NHIS),Health and Retirement Study(HRS),Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey(MCBS), Panel Study of Income Dynamics(PSID), and National Social Life, Health and Aging Project(NSHAP). We used a machine-assisted literature search with Python.

RESULTS: Since 2010, 24,811 papers have been published using these datasets. We searched for measures in 5 WH dimensions-sleep(hours of sleep, daytime sleepiness, Pittsburgh Sleep Index), nutrition (fruits per day, vegetables per day),movement (exercise/week, body mass index), emotional health (psychological distress scale, depression), and mind-body (use of complementary or alternative medicines, meditation, yoga). NHANES, NHIS, and PSID provided data in 4 components; BRFSS, HRS, MCBS, and NSHAP provided data in 3 components; and MEPS provided data in 2 components.

CONCLUSIONS: There is a lack of data to evaluate the effectiveness of the WH model on health outcomes at the individual and systems level. Currently ecological studies that combine diverse data sources are not possible. Our findings highlight the need for increased efforts and funding to collect nationally representative data on WH with standardized measures.