• The Patient Pathways provides clinicians with useful tools to start conversations about making lifestyle changes, assess a patient’s readiness for change and if suitable, set up and use Healthy Habits to track their lifestyle changes.
• A simple mobile app that patients use to set personalised goals and track their progress. There are many health and lifestyle apps on the market, but few link patients to a primary healthcare professional. Healthy Habit users can allow their GP and practice team to see progress, so they can discuss their goals and overcome any challenges with your support.
• Intuitive clinician dashboard for your general practice team to view and monitor a patient’s progress and send one-way messages to offer support and encouragement.
•  A Resource Hub which includes a directory of information, programs, education and CPD training available to your general practice team to support patients to make positive lifestyle changes.

Healthy Habits has been designed by the RACGP in consultation with GPs, Primary Health Care Nurses, practice managers, health consumers and behaviour change experts. It is based on behaviour change theory.

While Healthy Habits can be used by anyone, we have found that patients with the following characteristics are most likely to benefit from Healthy Habits:

• Aged 40 years and over
• At risk of, or recently diagnosed with a chronic condition related to a sedentary lifestyle such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
• Currently on a chronic disease management plan, where increased physical activity, improved sleep or nutrition would complement their treatment
• At early stages of behaviour change (contemplation stage) whereby they would benefit from learning more about physical activity, sleep health and nutrition and being supported to set up and maintain healthier habits.
• Possess a reasonable level of digital literacy.

The Healthy Habits program will benefit your practice by:

• Strengthening clinician abilities: The patient pathways provides clinicians with useful tools to enhance their skills in motivating behaviour change in patients with unhealthy lifestyles.
• Informed decision-making: The clinician dashboard presents up-to-date patient data that enables clinicians to have informed conversations with their patients during consultations.
• Innovative healthcare delivery: The patient app allows patients to work together with their GP team to set goals, celebrate success and work on trouble spots.
• Focused Quality Improvement and CPD: The Healthy Habits Resource Hub provides access to Quality Improvement activities such as the Healthy Habits PDSA template and directory of relevant CPD for general practice clinicians.
• Complement and strengthen your practice’s services: Healthy Habits is easy to embed within existing workflows and can be included in Chronic disease GP Management Plans and Team Care Arrangements.

Putting it into practice: Implementing Healthy Habits in your practice is a helpful online guide to assist practices in their roll-out of Healthy Habits. The guide takes you through assigning roles and responsibilities to team members, enrolling patients, example workflows and billing, training and education, and quality improvement activities.

Healthy Habits is designed for any Australian general practice and other primary health care providers. Register now to create an account to access your practice dashboard.