Ensuring your clients success is of top priority for wellness professionals. One way to drive your clients’ success rate up is by progressively measuring their success over time. This will not only help you keep track of their progress weekly, but will only give your clients the motivation they need to support them in meeting their goals. With each of your clients’ having a unique and inspiring story to tell, they all have different wellness journeys. This means it can be challenging to institute one single way to measure their success.

Here are 3 reasons why tracking health metrics will benefit your clients, and your business:

1. Improves Client Motivation and Retention

Tailoring the metrics that you track with clients can be incredibly motivating and empowering. By shifting gears from focusing on one measure of “progress,” like weight, clients can begin to look at their progress in terms of multiple metrics (body fat, body measurements, lab results, improved sleep and stress, etc). Establishing multiple nutrition metrics to monitor is a way to treat the whole person, for long-term, sustainable wellness.

Even more, using a more relevant and data-driven approach will help client’s feel confident in their progress, and propel them to continue working on their goals. With improved client retention, your clients (and practice) will see overall improved results over time.

Once your clients see their results forming, it will give them motivation and align them to stay determined and focused throughout their entire journey. For instance, although losing weight isn’t always a linear process, like anything in life there are ups and downs, but seeing results in the beginning will give them hope in reaching their goals. Once they achieved their set goals with you, this will give them more leeway and time to work on other aspects of their lives they want to improve.

Goals can also provide more opportunities to check in with your clients, and Healthie’s Free Starter Plan can make those check-ins even easier by expediting calendar and client scheduling. Click here to learn how to get started with the Free Starter Plan today.

2. Tracking health metrics allows for a personalized wellness plan

In the very first session together, it’s very likely that your client has a specific goal or several goals that they are planning to work on with you. They might even be brainstorming ideas in their head before their initial consult. Being able to translate those goals into smaller, actionable steps and incorporating a way to evaluate their progress towards these goals is crucial.

Beyond looking at a single metric, such as weight, you can incorporate other health metrics into your client’s wellness plan. This creates a “bigger picture” for clients regarding their health, as opposed to becoming overly-fixated on a single number (like the scale). Discussing these metrics upfront, and explaining how you’ll mark progress over time, helps your client to have a clear understanding of what to expect. By tailoring the health metrics you’re monitoring for your specific client, they can be reassured that the wellness goals they are working on will have clear health benefits in the long-run.

For instance, a client is low energy, and they want to work on using food to improve their diet and energy levels. There are varying approaches you can take for this client.

Example Personalized Nutrition and Wellness Plan:

Build out specific nutritional steps to take, and review the progress towards these goals each session with your client:

• Incorporate a protein and carb-based breakfast → monitor by client logging meals daily
• Add a snack in the afternoon, when client is lowest energy → monitor by client logging snacks daily
• Improve B12 levels → monitor by testing B12 levels monthly and creating a custom metric in Healthie to log B12 levels each month (showing the upward trend in values over time)  
• Increase water intake → monitor by adding a custom metric for “Water intake” and have client log cups of water consumed daily

Healthie allows for you to create customizable plans for your clients, click here to get started with a Free Starter Account today.

3. Using health metrics facilitates multi-disciplinary healthcare

When connecting with other healthcare providers, it’s one thing to tell them about the wellness goals you work on with clients, and it’s another thing to show them the results you get. This can be especially powerful in demonstrating the value of your services to doctors. As they say, “actions speak much louder than words.” Same goes for individuals in the wellness industry. Having certain credentials that you do also means that you are looked highly upon and that you are very knowledgeable in your field of study. Keeping up your reputation is important as healthcare providers since this career has recently become very competitive.

When you connect with your client’s doctor, and E-Fax them an update on Client A’s progress, including a summary of their results (with graphs of their metrics) clearly demonstrates the success you’ve helped your mutual client achieve. This showcases the value of your services, and your client’s doctor will likely refer other patients for your nutrition counseling services.

Tip: Many providers choose to create a handout or informational video to help guide their clients through tracking metrics.

If there are metrics that you typically track with your clients, creating an educational resource will allow you to communicate:

• The value of tracking these metrics: how often you’ll track them and reference ranges as appropriate
• Which units/metrics to use while tracking (ie. inches and pounds, or centimeters and kilograms?)
• How your client can log a metric, and view graphs in Healthie? Learn more about this feature and many others that you can try for free when you sign up for Healthie’s Starter Plan.

Custom health metrics commonly tracked by nutrition and wellness professionals

Body composition measurements:

• Muscle Mass
• Wait-to-Hip Ratio
• Caliper measurements
• Body Fat
• Pediatric Growth Charts

Lab values:

• Vitamin and Nutrient Levels (Vitamin D, Iron, B12, Folic Acid, etc)
• Fasting Blood Sugar (Finger Sticks)
• Hemoglobin a1C
• Hormone Levels
• Fluid intake or output
• Chem 7 values (ie. Sodium, Potassium, Phosphorous)
• Blood Pressure
• Cholesterol Levels
• Hormone Levels

Lifestyle metrics:

• Hours of sleep
• Perceived stress levels
• Number of bowel movements

How to Track Client Health Metrics

When working with clients, one huge barrier to tracking and staying up-to-date on your client’s progress is that it can be difficult to find one tool to use across all of your clients. With many forms of documentation, charting and apps to leverage, it can be difficult to track your clients across multiple platforms.

With Healthie’s customizable Metrics Feature, you can leverage the existing database metrics or create any custom metric you’d like to track for any individual client. Taking customization even further, in the profile settings for your client, you can control which metrics they can see and log. Choose to display the metrics that will be most motivating to your client, and either log the updates directly in your client’s account during a session, or allow your client to log their own updates. Click here to learn how you can try Healthie and our services for $0.