Discussing Results from a National Corporate Culture of Health Survey: Is the Health Promotion Profession Ready for a Broader Value Proposition?

November 19, 2019 12:00 pm Central | Register

Guest Panelists:

With Dr. Sara Singer, Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Professor by courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Hosted by Dr. Paul Terry, HERO, Senior Fellow

Dr. Singer will present results from a national survey recently published in the Milbank Quarterly. The survey is derived from the broad value proposition in a book by Quelch and Boudreau entitled: Building a Culture of Health: A New Imperative for Business, which examines the interface of social and business trends and argues that four pillars are needed if business is to accrue the advantages of leading with a culture of health. Taken directly from their book, the pillars are:

1. “Consumer health: How organizations affect the safety, integrity, and healthfulness of the products and services they offer to their customers and end consumers.”
2. “Employee health: How organizations affect the health of their employees (e.g., provision of employer-sponsored health insurance, workplace practices and wellness programs).”
3. “Community health: How organizations affect the health of the communities in which they operate and do business.”
4. “Environmental Health: How organizations’ environmental policies (or lack thereof) affect individual and population health.”

We will discuss the detailed findings from the national survey and, as always, we will poll webinar participants for your views on the implications of this research for your practice. Some of the findings Dr. Singer will describe are that only 8% of businesses report having a strategic plan for promoting a culture of health that included all four pillars. The survey asked about whether businesses took 38 specific actions to promote a culture of health across the four pillars, and found that only 2% of businesses were in the top quartile for action-taking in all four dimensions. This webinar will also examine the connections between the Milbank article with the Workplace Health in America Survey results published in the American Journal of Health Promotion. Those findings indicate that relatively few companies took a comprehensive approach to employee health promotion in 2018, though at 12% it nearly doubled the percent of companies that were sponsoring comprehensive approaches back in 2004. We will discuss parallels between employee health in America in 2004 and the employer’s role in a Culture of Health in America in 2019.

 

Dr. Singer is a Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Professor by courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Before Stanford, Dr. Singer developed and taught courses at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health entitled “Health Care Organizations and Organizational Behavior” and “Leadership and Innovation in Health Care Organizations.” She also taught in the Harvard PhD in Health Policy core course and conducted leadership training programs for the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Massachusetts General Physician Organization on topics related to organizational culture, leadership and teamwork.

Dr. Singer’s research productivity is extraordinary with more than 100 articles published in academic journals and books on healthcare management, health policy and health system reform. Singer’s publications have won numerous awards, including best paper awards from the Academy of Management’s Health Care Division in three consecutive years, and she was the recipient of the Avedis Donabedian Healthcare Quality Award from the American Public Health Association. Singer shared the results of the national culture of health survey as a keynote speaker at HERO’s Forum19, and this webinar builds on questions and comments she fielded from the audience.

Ecosystems for Healthy Lifestyles

December 12, 2019 12:00 pm Central | Register

Guest Panelists:

This webinar will review the conceptual framework and implementation strategy for Ecosystems for Healthy Lifestyles, an emerging grass roots effort to make healthy lifestyles the norm in Colorado, presented by Dr. Michael O’Donnell, lead advocate for the effort.

Every healthcare professional knows the PROBLEM. Our toxic lifestyles are making us sick and driving medical spending to levels that are unsustainable for individuals, employers, state governments and especially the federal government.

Most professionals know that harnessing lifestyle as medicine offers a potentially powerful and cost-effective SOLUTION. But, despite some remarkable successes in clinical, workplace and community settings, so many efforts have fallen short because they use superficial efforts that are not scientifically validated approaches, especially to address the cultural and socioeconomic conditions that influence health behaviors. Equally important, the vast majority of the US population (our estimate is 95%) does not have access to comprehensive scientifically validated approaches. This is one of the most impactful health disparities in society. The core problem is lack of resources, not just financial resources, but also social capital, intellectual capital and policy authority. So, the real solution needs to be mobilizing more resources to support harnessing lifestyle as medicine, but how do we do that? The answer is a core element of our approach.

Our approach has five core elements:

• Move beyond the intermittent “programs” that reach too few people, to creating ecosystems that engage all people where they work, learn, pray, play and heal…regardless of their economic status or geographic location.
• Provide a therapeutic dose of evidence-based approaches that change people’s knowledge, motivation, skills and behavior and create opportunities in their social, economic and physical environments to make it possible to practice healthy lifestyle.
• Aspire to be fiscally self-sustainable, requiring no government funding, requiring only seed funding from foundations and repaying that seed funding over time.
• Reach a scale large enough to help solve state and national level problems.
• Create a mobilizing organization (MOG) that identifies and harnesses the financial, social, intellectual capital and the policy authority from individuals and organizations that have these resources and will better achieve their own goals by investing a small portion of those resources in this effort.

 

Michael O’Donnell is CEO of the Art and Science of Health Promotion Institute and lead advocate of Ecosystems for Healthy Lifestyles. He is also founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of the American Journal of Health Promotion, founder and program chair of the Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference, founder and chairman emeritus of Health Promotion Advocates.

He has served as an employee in leadership roles in four major health systems, including the Cleveland Clinic, as well as serving as the Director of the Health Management Research Center and a faculty member in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan. He has also worked directly as a consultant with more than 150 employers, health care organizations, government agencies, foundations, insurance companies and health promotion providers to develop and refine health promotion programs, products, policies and legislation.

Michael has authored more than 200 articles, book chapters and columns and 6 books and workbooks, including Health Promotion in the Workplace, which has been in continuous publication since 1984 and translated into four languages. He has presented more than 300 keynote and workshop presentations on six continents, partially or fully owned 7 small businesses, served on boards and committees for 50 non-profit and for-profit organizations and received 15 national awards. He conceived and authored legislation that was incorporated into the Affordable Care Act, including provisions that resulted in production of the annual National Prevention Strategy. He earned a PhD in Health Behavior from University of Michigan, an MBA in General Management and an MPH in Hospital Management, both from University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in psychobiology from Oberlin College. He attended high school and was later a Senior Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor in Seoul Korea.