A Dutch occupational health and safety service and TNO

Prevention is better than cure. This adage has been on the rise in medicine in recent years. More and more is known about lifestyle diseases: diseases that occur more often in people with a certain way of life. Lifestyle medicine prevents rather than cures by changing dietary patterns and ensuring adequate exercise, more sleep, and less stress.

A large Dutch occupational health and safety service wants to advise their clients on health gains that can be achieved.  To do this, they work together with scientists from the TNO Healthy Living program. They developed a model for calculating possible health gains. Based on hundreds of variables from questionnaires, blood and hair tests and interviews with occupational health physicians, they calculated where possible opportunities lie for improving future health. This allows knowledge from scientific research to be applied in the field.

The challenge was to make the calculations of the health gains available in real time to the occupational health and safety physicians and the clients to make sure good advice could be given quickly.

The collaboration with the occupational health and safety service, their application developer and TNO resulted in a platform that is unique in the Netherlands. Using the DMN decision model, occupational health and safety physicians are now able to provide their clients with scientifically proven advice. This provides insight into their health based on a peer comparison. It provides insight into the years that can be gained and tries to stimulate users to make improvements in their lifestyle. The ultimate goal is a larger number of healthy working years.