The Herman Trend Alert
February 18, 2015
Developing a Wellness Model for Healthcare
In other countries of the world, notably China and India, doctors and other healthcare professional are paid to keep people healthy. In the United States and elsewhere in the world, doctors are paid to "cure diseases". This system encourages doctors to run tests and find problems to fix, rather than focusing on maintaining health. With the exception of annual physical examinations, most patients in the US see doctors only when something is wrong. Patients with or recovering from chronic diseases see doctors on a regular basis, but only to ensure that the disease state does not worsen.
Clinton Foundation highlights the benefits for all
Recently the Clinton Foundation's Health Matters Initiative held a forum in California about healthcare. Its purpose was to highlight recent successes of entrepreneurial companies in using a prevention- or wellness-based model for healthcare.
In fact, the mission of The Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI) is "to improve the health and well-being of people . . . across all generations. CHMI supports entrepreneurs "to build scalable solutions to address the drivers of health and wellness".
Entrepreneurs using big data to save lives and money
The first panel was composed of four entrepreneurs who are making a profound difference through their start-ups that use big data to help predict disease---and saving lives and millions of dollars at the same time.
Peter Moore of Integrity Square then shared an impact announcement about Smacktive, a mobile app that provides "a real world social network to connect people who want to do healthy and fun activities such as going to the gym, biking, playing tennis, or even playing a board game, but who struggle to find like-minded people in their community to share in these activities". Inspired by the 2014 Health Matters Summit, though Smacktive is available everywhere, the focus on New York/New Jersey is short term---to reach about 100,000 or so users. To reach this critical mass, Smacktive needs to focus, just like other local apps do. Eventually, they plan to be all over the US---with millions of users.
Local projects work, too!
Other examples of how technology is being used to forecast disease have saved thousands of lives already. In Palm Springs, where the conference was held, the Mayor talked about "Ready, Set, Swim".  Designed for elementary school children, participants spend half of their program time learning to swim and half learning about nutrition. Nutrition is an important key to staying well.
Empowering individuals and organizations to take responsibility for their own health just makes sense and actually has the potential to save billions of dollars and thousands of lives in the US alone. Globally, the potential is enormous. If applied, this approach could help the world cope with the large number of seniors who will stress the capacity of healthcare systems around the world.
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The Herman Group, 7112 Viridian Lane, Austin, Texas 78739 USA 336.210.3548 www.hermangroup.com