Lifestyle Medicine: Delivering Sustainable Health & Sustainable Healthcare

The pendulum swings: Hippocrates’ wisdom of empowering self-care and prescribing food as medicine, for example, has been juxtaposed by abdicating internal locus of control and, instead, prescribing ever-increasing quantities of pills and procedures to manage a pandemic of chronic disease that’s driven by unhealthful lifestyle behavior. Having now faced the reality of a disease and disability care system that fails to serve the best interest of patients, practitioners, employers, families, communities, our nation, and our world, evidence-based, lifestyle medicine is now being recognized as the needed foundation of a transformed and sustainable system of healthcare delivery. To prevent lifestyle-rooted chronic disease, treat and even reverse it, to rein in out-of-control healthcare spending, to promote planetary health and ignite healthy communities; and, ultimately, to add years to lives and life to years, lifestyle medicine is unquestionably the urgently needed foundation of health and all healthcare. Yet, it has been challenging to bring lifestyle medicine to market in an economically sustainable way; it’s largely been confined to “concierge” services or lifestyle programs in health systems. How do we close the gap? By fusing of plan sponsor payment, value-based payment models, an operating model that bolsters the clinical delivery of LM by PCPs, and a built community that surrounds members of the clinic and makes the healthy choice the easy choice. We’re working toward a model of care delivery that connects the "supply" of Lifestyle Medicine-Certified Physicians and Healthcare Professionals to the "demand" (or need) in an economically sustainable and scalable way.