1. Develop new health roles
Opportunity
Develop new health roles beyond just traditional medical care professionals and public health providers
Recommendation
The nation should develop new health roles for both workers and volunteers who focus on health as a value in and of itself.
We can expand the version of the community lay worker at the local level and create a new community systems worker to ensure that education, urban planning, transportation and the private sector systems all support health.
The definitions of both health and community are expanding. So we will need to help train current workers in the new understanding of health as having many dimensions, such as social and spiritual health along with the common associations with physical and medical health. And the understanding of community will need to be broad to incorporate online communities of interest along with geographically and culturally based communities.
We also need health strategists and integrators within the health care system to address issues in the community. Finally, we need to develop career paths for under-represented communities.
The new roles will bring skills and competencies needed to organize a community and approach health problems which are rooted in statistics and rapid learning. The skills include:
- Awareness of local community resources
- Awareness of digital assistance resources
- Communication skills
- Sensitivity to healthy literacy – cultural, generational, community, family and spiritual content
- Needs assessment skills
- Creative financial skills to show how communities find monies for the new role
- Behavioral and motivational skills for a person-centered approach
Open Recommendation >> 2. Incentives for innovation using liberated data
Opportunity
Focus the health tech sector on community health metrics.
Recommendation
The nation should create market incentives for innovation using liberated data that links into an intelligent health grid for improving community health outcomes.
Today we have a need but not a market for improving community health. We are blind without the health data in a unified source that is communicable to all as metrics for improvement. Therefore we need to remove restrictions to putting data in the hands of entrepreneurs and organizations ready to improve the health of communities.
Right now large data stores from government health agencies (Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicare, Department of Defense, etc.) are unavailable to innovators in Silicon Valley and around the nation. We need to liberate data while creating business incentives for improving population health. This data can flow through existing smart-grid technology to create feedback for smarter individual and community health choices.
The following prerequisites need to be met to bring the potential of the tech sector to community health:
- Define shared (community) health metrics and align payment systems for health outcomes; big data can bring us big health gains
- Develop the business models that offer incentives for prevention and pre-disease diagnosis so that caregivers and discovery scientists work with communities to convert personal data clouds into actionable information for improving community health
- Use regional partnerships between major clinical institutions, systems biology institutes and communities with consumers and patients learning to improve population and individual health
- Build community storage systems for multi-source integrated health data, including genomics, proteomics, sensors, lab data, pharmaceutical prescriptions, environmental data, social media data and non-obvious health data that will emerge as we learn to improve community health
- Shape policies providing individual ownership of personal data while offering individuals and communities the ability to opt in for release of their data to tech vendors and entrepreneurs
- Establish sites to rapidly test innovations in community health then get the evidence distributed for iterating successes in multiple communities
- Revamp regulation to make it sensible and supportive for community health gains. The FDA (e.g., when regulating mobile apps) and HIPAA should support the health tech sector capacity to improve community health.
Open Recommendation >> |
4. Embrace our collective spiritual journey
Opportunity
Remove Barriers to Health
Recommendation
Our nation should refresh the American Dream by embracing values shared across generations and faith traditions, and by assuring that all are engaged in removing the barriers to health as part of our collective spiritual journey.
Our nation is underachieving in health as inequities have grown through the single-minded pursuit of wealth that has misaligned our priorities and undermined our quality of life.
The effort to remove barriers to health can begin by building on existing accomplishments and initiatives while working to:
- Create health enterprise zones in vulnerable areas to leverage and synthesize existing data for mapping disparities while mobilizing community wellness initiatives directed by a common aim to address the health and wellbeing of all
- Establish a public-private sector collaborative movement to build health in all policies; include business, unions, education, agriculture, transportation, housing, non-profits, philanthropy, elected officials, civil service, faith communities and the Federal Reserve, among others.
- Establish Interagency Health Councils at federal, state, and local levels and periodically invite movement leaders to meet with the Councils and define a common agenda including shared goals.
- Provide values-based education across the lifespan that addresses psychological, social, spiritual, environmental and intellectual engagement while honoring different faith and cultural traditions with use of reflection and meditation techniques chosen by students.
- Shape a personal development model that incorporates biological, psychological, social and spiritual learning which places altruism, joy, love and faith in the context of the original pursuit of happiness as the American Dream.
- Offer incentives to promote a health-oriented national culture using budget and contract levers that encourage individuals to balance work, play and social engagements which help people achieve their highest potential.
- Place an economic value on health with health credits and credit swapping to help change the culture through recognition of the value of health
Open Recommendation >> 3. Community leadership as a “flash mob for health”
Opportunity
Cultivate new leadership for a healthy society
Recommendation
The nation should encourage community leadership in a “flash mob for health” that increases wellbeing, vitality and supports each person’s potential to move toward a flourishing society at all levels and in all sectors and communities.
Great leadership has a sense of purpose that generates commitments and great followership. Community leadership education and development processes can use an ecological whole person model. This form of leadership is at once personal and in concert with others who can mobilize people to rally around taking responsibility for health at both the individual and community levels.
People need to learn how to self-lead as well as how to lead others in team-based learning that begins with a vision of a healthier society. Learning communities create connections that foster the capacity to listen to the perspectives of both older and younger people and to cross boundaries between fields and organizations so that health permeates all sectors.
The keys to fostering leadership for health so that the nation flourishes through community engagement include:
- Convene local leadership sessions supported by people from the military, the Peace Corps, business and recognized non-profit organizations.
- Create a cultural change leadership group dedicated to fostering the movement to bring about the profound cultural shift and vision of healthy people in healthy places.
- Communicate the key concepts of health, wellness, salutogenesis and holism using words such as flourishing and wellbeing which people relate to easily.
- Offer leadership teachings to various audiences, including youths and elders, who can diffuse lessons through schools and community projects.
- Create a National Health Corps that includes chapters and programs for people at various stages of their careers and connects virtual as well as geographic communities.
- Use a case-based learning process that incorporates complexity theory and change management knowledge applied through teams that support community health.
- Teach communities to organize around goals and metrics; then create the conditions for the “first followers” to emerge at the local level while dismantling the old leadership paradigm and structural constraints that inhibit young leaders
Open Recommendation >> |