A Moment for Health

Greg Weidner, MD FACP
Whose health is it anyway?
4 min readMay 12, 2020

“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.” — Kitty O’Meara

Health matters. The COVID-19 worldwide pandemic has shown us this, among its many powerful and sometimes staggering lessons. While so many frontline workers heroically fight the acute, life-threatening consequences of this virus, healthcare battles are being waged across many other theaters. We are actively battling a common enemy — a ruthless, communicable disease — while simultaneously facing the longstanding epidemic of non-communicable chronic disease. These are, in fact, closely linked campaigns: people with lifestyle-sensitive chronic conditions are among those at highest risk for critical illness and death from the coronavirus (in addition to other risk groups based on older age, immunocompromised status, and long-term care facility residence).

Recent population-based survey data estimates that “45.4% of US adults are potentially at increased risk for complications from COVID-19 because of chronic conditions that are, in turn, associated with common modifiable risk factors.” Complicating matters further are issues of access to care for those chronic disease patients most vulnerable — because of issues related to health equity and social determinants of health (made more acute by the pandemic), and also because of limited access to in-person care resulting from concerns about contagion.

People need access to their care teams — for guidance, support, and peace of mind during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also seeing a heightened awareness of health and lifestyle behaviors: to promote immunity and avoid coronavirus infection and complications, to maintain physical and emotional well-being during trying times, and to prepare for a future marked by health and vigor rather than vulnerability and risk. How do healthcare organizations address these needs, and allow their patients to feel cared for during these unsettling times? Under the best of circumstances, delivering whole-person care and enabling health behavior change demands a team-based, connected care approach — to engage people within the fabric of their lives rather than just episodically in the clinic. During the current crisis, digital-forward, remote models of connected care have become a foundational imperative.

Our team at Carium has been fortunate to be able to help our many partners realize the full potential of connected health. Carium provides a powerful and flexible digital health software platform that supports healthcare providers in scalably delivering personalized engagement, behavior change, and improved cardiometabolic and whole-person health — all in the context of their medical care relationship. This week, Carium is proud to announce our membership in the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) corporate roundtable. This partnership will help us advance the mission we share with ACLM — to catalyze models of care that focus on lifestyle behavior change as a primary modality for the prevention, treatment, and reversal of chronic disease.

Our partners in the lifestyle medicine community have been at the vanguard of innovation before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Their commitment to their patients and their creativity, married with our platform capabilities and agility, have allowed us to move quickly and purposefully to connect people with their health and with their care teams.

At Progressive Health of Delaware, Dr. Dave Donohue (Chief Medical Officer and Director of Lifestyle Medicine) and his remarkable team worked with us to create a “Safe at Home” program for seniors — providing automated and skill-optimized check-ins to help identify those most in need of support and care. This is personalized digital population health in action, supporting the type of consumer-friendly engagement that drives loyalty and long-term relationships. This program complements the work that Progressive already had in progress to deliver chronic condition management, lifestyle medicine disease reversal programs, and remote patient monitoring — all while leveraging emerging reimbursement frameworks to align compensation with their new models of care delivery.

At Lifestyle Medical in Southern California, practice and ACLM founder Dr. Wayne Dysinger, CEO Arwin Soetanto, and their committed care team have leveraged the Carium platform to extend and enhance their connection with patients — for chronic condition care, remote patient monitoring, and group programs for lifestyle medicine. While they’ve leveraged synchronous video visits like most primary care practices in the face of the current crisis, they’ve also realized the opportunity to deliver on continuous, collaborative models of skill-optimized care that are relevant in the current moment and well beyond.

“For our individual patients to achieve improvements in their chronic diseases and overall maximal health, they need to feel like they own their health themselves. They also must feel deeply connected to a caring health care provider team. Some of this happens in the office setting, but using available tools supports this happening virtually in organized and inspiring ways.” — Dr. Wayne Dysinger

Just as we worry about the second wave of this viral pandemic, we also await a second wave of healthcare system response to its impact. New models of care will continue to emerge. Reimbursement will follow. Patient expectations and capabilities, as well as provider and care team adoption of digital tools, will continue to move forward. Behaviors will change. Cost curves will bend. We will begin to see and address the many theaters on which the battle for health must be won.

We look forward to helping people, healers, and the healthcare industry meet their shadows. And think differently. And wage this war on the battlefront of chronic disease with the same fervor with which we are attacking the current pandemic. Health matters.

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Greg Weidner, MD FACP
Whose health is it anyway?

Provider and transformer of healthcare with one simple goal: Inspire Health through all available channels. Chief Medical Officer, Carium.