Lowering Barriers to Health Risk Assessments in Promoting Personalized Health Management

This study investigates the feasibility of accurately predicting adverse health events without relying on costly data acquisition methods, such as laboratory tests, in the era of shifting healthcare paradigms towards community-based health promotion and personalized preventive healthcare through individual health risk assessments (HRAs). We assessed the incremental predictive value of four categories of predictor variables—demographic, lifestyle and family history, personal health device, and laboratory data—organized by data acquisition costs in the prediction of the risks of mortality and five chronic diseases. Machine learning methodologies were employed to develop risk prediction models, assess their predictive performance, and determine feature importance. Using data from the National Sample Cohort of the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), which includes eligibility, medical check-up, healthcare utilization, and mortality data from 2002 to 2019, our study involved 425,148 NHIS members who underwent medical check-ups between 2009 and 2012. Models using demographic, lifestyle, family history, and personal health device data, with or without laboratory data, showed comparable performance. A feature importance analysis in models excluding laboratory data highlighted modifiable lifestyle factors, which are a superior set of variables for developing health guidelines. Our findings support the practicality of precise HRAs using demographic, lifestyle, family history, and personal health device data. This approach addresses HRA barriers, particularly for healthy individuals, by eliminating the need for costly and inconvenient laboratory data collection, advancing accessible preventive health management strategies.