The Whole Person Health Index is the first tool from the National Institutes of Health that scores your whole health as a single number. It asks nine plain questions about your life, each rated from Poor to Excellent, and adds them into one total that rises as you grow healthier across every part of your life.
What is the Whole Person Health Index?
The Whole Person Health Index (WPHI) is a nine-question self-assessment developed by the NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, led by Dr. Helene M. Langevin with Dr. Mark Pitcher, in collaboration with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, led by Dr. Stephen Blumberg. Each question covers one area of a full life, and together they produce a single score for your overall health. The tool is free to use, and it was published as two linked open-access papers (the original index paper and its validation study) in Global Advances in Integrative Medicine and Health in 2026.
For most of the last century, medicine measured health through the language of disease: blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, the size of a tumor. Each of those numbers describes a specific illness. The Whole Person Health Index measures the person instead: your body, your mind, your relationships, and your sense of purpose, combined into one number that moves as your life improves. It gives health its own measure, the way a lab test gives a disease its own measure.
The timing matters. The United States faces a rising tide of chronic disease, and research points to shared roots beneath many of these conditions, including chronic stress, poor diet, and inactivity, patterns that build quietly over years. A measure of the whole person makes it possible to spot that drift early and turn it around, which is exactly what the index is built to support.
What are the nine questions on the Whole Person Health Index?
The index asks you to rate nine areas of your life. Together they make up the whole person:
- Overall health
- Quality of life
- Social and family connections
- Diet
- Physical activity
- Ability to manage stress
- Sleep
- Meaning and purpose
- The ability to manage your own health
Each area is answered on the same simple five-point scale, which keeps the whole form short enough to finish in about two minutes and repeat as often as you like.
How is the Whole Person Health Index scored?
You rate each of the nine areas on a five-point scale, then add the nine answers into a single total from 9 to 45. A higher total means better whole health.
The five points are:
- 1 = Poor
- 2 = Fair
- 3 = Good
- 4 = Very Good
- 5 = Excellent
One score is a snapshot of where you stand today. Taken again over weeks and months, the score becomes a direction. Someone who scores 18 today and 31 six months later has measurably improved their whole person health, and a slide from 31 back to 18 shows health slipping. The number turns a vague sense of doing better into something you can actually see.
The most useful signal is the way the total moves over time, even more than any single reading. A score climbing toward 45 means your whole life is trending healthier. In research studies, scientists use the total as a secondary outcome to test whether everyday approaches such as better nutrition, more movement, stress support, and psychological care actually move whole person health. The questionnaire was validated by the National Center for Health Statistics against established measures in each of the nine areas, so the short form rests on real scientific footing.
The index is already in wide use. In 2025, more than 24,000 adults answered it through the CDC National Health Interview Survey, and it is rolling out across the NIH All of Us research program, a cohort of more than 600,000 people whose scores will be tracked over years.
