Neupert On Health : obesity

The Six Billion Pound Challenge -- How a Focus on Driving Outcomes can Improve Health Faster and Better than Legislation

pnblog — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:30:00 GMT

I commend the administration for shining the light on the need to improve health in America! While I want to be optimistic about change, I’m skeptical about how much real improvement we will really see under the guise of healthcare reform. Like I’ve noted before, the national conversation we are having -- which bill will pass, a public option or not, an abortion amendment or not, which party is winning -- is just the wrong conversation. Imagine if we were to take all the TV time, print space, blogs, and so on, consumed by the political debate and use it to advance an audacious goal like improving the state of our health! Imagine what we could accomplish with a big sustainable campaign across schools, employers, state governments and the media -- just imagine!

Today’s reality is that more than 75 percent of America’s healthcare costs stem from six chronic diseases. About 133 million Americans -- nearly one in two adults -- live with at least one chronic illness -- and the numbers are forecasted to grow unless we do something differently. Realistically, the only way to maintain some fiscal responsibility under any reform scheme is to address the controllable elements of chronic diseases.

What if we were to focus on a couple of conditions like obesity and diabetes? Two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight, leading to chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and other conditions. Currently, obesity alone costs the health system $147 billion a year! What’s more, obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for developing the six chronic diseases that drive the majority of direct and indirect costs to our system, including diabetes ($218 billion), cardiovascular disease and stroke ($437.5 billion). Not to mention childhood obesity with equally alarming statistics (one in six children are obese), the most alarming of which is that children who are obese have a 70% chance of being obese as adults. Yet, obesity is completely within our control to manage/prevent.

According to CDC, the average American adult (age 20 and 74) is 5’6 ¾”, weighs 177.65 pounds and has a BMI of 28 (Note: an adult who has a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight and an adult who has a BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese). To achieve a BMI of 24, America needs to lose 29 pounds per person. With the U.S. adult population at 205,639,360, that means 5,963,541,440 pounds…almost six billion pounds.

If we were to collectively lose this weight, we would have a direct impact on obesity and as a result, diabetes and other conditions. Healthier diet and exercise are things we can immediately start doing -- without legislation. Not to sound trite, but losing weight can be the “quick fix” for our health problems and rising costs. Obese individuals incur an 42% more in medical expenditures -- about $4,800 for per person per year -- compared with normal weight individuals, who incur an average of about $3,400 in such expenses. And little things matter -- for example, walking half an hour a day, five days a week cuts the incidence of diabetes by 40%. Think of the impact we could have on costs and the economy!

I know losing weight is hard work, but letting the growing waistlines of America continue unchecked will only doom us to continue the cycle of out-of-control healthcare spending. While I’m not sure I agree with Japan’s approach to legalizing waistlines, it does seem to have an impact. If we can send a man to the moon, create 200 different versions of yellow sticky notes and other wonders of the modern world, we can figure out how to lose a few billion pounds!

And it should all start with a public education campaign. Even though this is fundamentally marketing, it does belong in the domain of government action. It doesn’t take much to create a great ad campaign, viral marketing and so on. Look at the popularity of shows like the Biggest Loser -- now there’s a whole line of products and services. There have been a lot of one-off “celebrities” championing the cause of weight loss -- Mike Huckabee, Valerie Bertinelli, and others. But these have been isolated. Imagine if the government organized a group of great marketing companies -- Nike, Apple, Proctor and Gamble -- and got them together to create a campaign about obesity and health -- and involve popular sports heros or celebrities -- in a sustained way over a period of time. I’d bet there’d be some impact. Another great example of something that could easily and inexpensively be rolled out to schools nationally is the preventative childhood obesity program driven by the Columbus Research Foundation. These folks thought deeply about how to influence middle school students, and developed a program focused on education around diet/nutrition and exercise -- including a virtual cross-country competitive walk (students used pedometers connected to the Internet via HealthVault to track their progress). Ten middle schools were involved with nearly 1000 participants.

Real reform in healthcare isn’t solely the responsibility of government. It’s about individual responsibility and how we, as consumers, embrace our part of the current situation. I hope that reform will include changes to the payment system to enable and reinforce changes in behavior and stimulate innovation, but we don’t need to rely only on legislation to make things better. We can all individually start making better choices.

I understand that neither 'health reform' nor legislation are easy. As many have noted, whatever legislation passes will not include a 'silver bullet solution' to either goal 'bending the cost curve' or improving the value we get for our healthcare spend. Simple things can make a difference. By taking more responsibility for our own actions, we can impact the healthcare costs of our nation.

Three Seattle Health Conferences in One Week!

pnblog — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:46:00 GMT

Last week was the HealthVault Solutions conference held by my team. The metrics were great -- lots of new applications launched and partners signed, attendance oversold, 600 people, 285 different organizations etc. -- but the story is not in the numbers. What excited me was the energy in the room -- the passion of the people who work in health and want to be part of doing better for consumers. Many participants came up to me at the end of the first day (after 2 hour demo session) and said they were really starting to get it -- the benefits of a personal health data platform -- with multiple applications sharing data as determined by the user. Getting it is a good sign. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was the keynote speaker the next morning, took the energy level up a notch and raised the stakes. Dr. Oz shared his sweeping vision of empowering consumers (YOU) to improve health -- but the key learning for me was -- to truly engage consumers you must connect with them emotionally. Reason by itself -- don't smoke you will get cancer, don't eat too much you will get fat -- simply is not enough to change behavior. Personalization, connectivity are key -- but we have to be able to connect at the emotional level with users - -this is a new set of challenges. We also announced the winners of our innovation fund - the HealthVault Be Well Fund. We were astonished by the diversity and quality of responses -- and excited to inform the winners, so we can get started on the 15 exciting projects.

Yesterday, Microsoft hosted the Center for Health Transformation (CHT) meeting on our campus. CHT is led by Newt Gingrich -- he is a tireless champion for change and for raising our expectations for results from the health delivery system. CHT does good work stimulating ideas, motivating policy makers to learn and be thoughtful when approaching health and creating connections between their members who are doing good work. Newt was a judge on the HealthVault Be Well Fund panel. Many U.S. ecosystem players participated and exchanged ideas -- sharing ways that IT plus leadership can improve overall results in the health delivery system -- like Gary Kaplan CEO at Virginia Mason, an integrated delivery system in Seattle that has utilized the "Toyota Lean" for system improvement. Given the fragmented nature of the health ecosystem -- these stories of best practices and improved results -- need to be told and retold and retold -- to motivate additional champions how to change and give practical examples of how to make progress.

The last two days I have been participating in the 4th annual Pacific Health Summit. The mission of the PHS is to bring leading scientists together with policy makers and industry to tackle hard problems in Global Health. It is a fascinating conference because of the mix of people (scientists, ministers, NGOs, industrialists) -- all of whom bring a real passion to helping "improve" Global Health -- but start from very different perspectives and world views. This years theme (selected a year ago) was around nutrition and the twin challenges of under nutrition (hunger, nutrient deficiencies and their impact on health status) and over nutrition (obesity, diabetes and the impact on health status and costs). The timeliness of the topic -- given current events -- only raised the level of urgency and passion behind the conversation. I won't even attempt to do justice to the theme in a brief blog -- given the complexity and interdependencies of the key threads -- I'm sure a final report will be published. I can report a few surprising data points for the benefit of others:

despite the lowest incidence of obesity -- Japan implemented a national policy in April to focus on prevention because of current costs and the need to change trend lines. This means that all people in Japan ages 40-74 are required to get an annual checkup. One panelist -- Takemi-san a former vice-minister of health -- described how he had made a public promise to lose 10 kilos - -and this became a big and frequent media event (waist measurement and weigh in). But he achieved the goal!
China too has started a new program to prevent obesity -- as part of an overall approach to public health. The program's essence is its simplicity -- healthy weight and healthy blood pressure. They determined that if they could motivate everyone to eat 40kcals less/day -- they could dramatically change future trend lines. So they ask people to eat 2 less bites off of their dinner plate.
India -- while being a food exporting nation -- has roughly 40% of children under 5 being under-weight. This data point was used to demonstrate that "point solutions" or "simple programs" don't work -- that behavior change at either the national or individual level require comprehensive approaches (education, training, incentives, etc) that also take into account culture and traditions.

The role of nutrition in Global Health is clearly important -- and impacts costs and outcomes throughout the system -- from childhood development through to the management or prevention of chronic conditions. One key takeaway for me is that it will require leadership (at multiple levels) and new forms of collaboration between the private sector and the public sector to sustainability address this issue.