Exercise – A Vital Sign for Health

Exercise is coming into its own! A study by Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Research and Evaluation has found that adding a vital sign for exercise as an assessment tool in clinical settings improves patient care. “This research offers preliminary support that implementing an exercise vital sign in addition to the traditional vital signs—pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and respirations— in a large health care system is very possible and could offer many benefits as well as additional patient data, ” said the primary investigator, Karen Coleman, Ph.D.

Kaiser Permanente began using the exercise vital sign in October 2009. Patients at Kaiser are routinely asked questions about their daily levels of activity and are assigned a minutes-per-week value based on their answer. For their study, the authors reviewed data from April 2010 to March 2011 from more than 1.7 million outpatient visits to Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Using a regression model, the study demonstrated that a greater disease burden increased the likelihood of physical inactivity among the sample patient population. Researchers also found lower activity levels among patients who were older, obese or members of ethnic minorities.

Robert E. Sallis, M.D., one of the authors and the chairman of the Exercise is Medicine^® advisory board said, “There is no better indicator of a person’s health and longevity than the minutes per week of activity a patient engages in. When incorporated in a healthcare setting, the exercise vital sign can be an important tool for prevention and management of disease.”