The shift from general to personalized health care is a growing trend, and with the opening of the Philip Heit Center for Healthy New Albany scheduled for early 2015, New Albany is poised to be at the center of the movement.
Personalized health care is a core component of plans for the center and for the way the center will affect the community at large.
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, a major partner in the Philip Heit Center, has been studying the new model for almost a decade via its Center for Personalized Health Care. The IDEA Studio for Health Care and Design at OSU is the successor of the Center for Personalized Health Care, and is focused on putting the solutions developed by the center into action.
The studio’s goal is to define health at an environmental level and understand everything that factors into it – nutrition, sleep, exercise, personal relationships, attitude, etc. It studies the way people age and looks at health as the opposite of aging – keeping people feeling younger at older ages, says Dr. Clay Marsh, vice dean for research at the OSU College of Medicine and executive director of the IDEA Studio.
“We’re really interested in understanding … the biological paradigm,” Marsh says.
Advances in medical science are making it ever easier to predict the health maladies to which a given individual may be susceptible, and personalized health care makes full use of those advances – determining not only what that person might have to worry about later in life, but what he or she can do now to head off those potential problems. That stands in stark contrast to a model of waiting for illness or injury to strike and then treating it.
“Our idea is that instead of rescuing from failure … we want to protect people from failure,” says Marsh.
The wellness center offers a fully integrated approach to health care, says Larry Lewellen, vice president of care coordination and health promotion at Wexner Medical Center. Every professional in the building, whatever that person’s specialty may be, will be on the same page, collaborating on assessment and prediction.
That ensures everyone who comes in benefits from the collective wisdom of every staffer he or she encounters. More comprehensive knowledge of current and future health issues puts an individual in the driver’s seat when it comes to health care decisions, and all staffers at the wellness center will strive to keep visitors apprised, Lewellen says.
“The key here is completely educating the person,” he says.
The standard health care model casts the medical practitioner as the expert and the patient as the follower, whereas, with this new model, the patient is given all the tools to become an expert himself or herself, Lewellen says. The center will offer a personalized environment to create a health plan for everyone who comes in, and once that plan is established, every practitioner, office staffer and fitness machine will know it.
“It’s for people who want to be at the highest level of energy, the highest level of capability,” he says.
That means preventing illness and injury, and if it already exists in the form of a chronic disease, that means helping the patient learn how to best manage life and thrive despite it. Even a perfectly healthy person can come in for a full fitness assessment by exercise science experts and – based on biometric data, family history, genetic prob
abilities and more – learn which chronic diseases might be risks and how they might be prevented.
Even if risks of chronic disease are not part of the picture, fitness plans can be goal-directed – say, if the subject wants to run a marathon, take a physically strenuous trip or prepare for retirement.
Staffers are being chosen for the wellness center based in part on their disciplines to determine they are the right fit for the center’s approach to health. Care is also being taken to utilize software that will link all electronic records. Each patient will have a personal device, possibly a USB drive, containing all of his or her medical information, and plugging it into an exercise machine will bring up information on the person’s last workout and suggestions for this one.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s presence at the wellness center will ensure that even New Albany’s youngest residents have access to better health care options. The hospital has a long-standing partnership with New Albany-Plain Local Schools, which includes sports medicine and athletic training, and will have an office at the wellness center.
The hospital’s portion of the wellness center will be focused on sports medicine, and proactive care has long been part of the sports medicine department’s agenda. It’s easier to prevent children, particularly student athletes, from injuring themselves than to treat an injury once it’s been suffered, says Lisa Kluchurosky, service line administrator for sports medicine at the hospital. Nationwide Children’s knows the common injuries, Kluchurosky says, and will implement programs to focus on and prevent those injuries.
Beyond that, it will teach about making healthful choices and incorporating physical activity into one’s life – and not just for athletes.
“We’ll obviously cater to that very athletic population, but we’ll also have a variety of programs that will focus on the non-athlete,” Kluchurosky says.
Marking small victories on the path to good health is one technique that Nationwide Children’s doctors will use at the wellness center, says Kluchurosky. Another is incorporating activities they like; for example, not every kid will cotton to running on a track, she says, and no two like all the same foods.
Co-locating a fitness center and a medical facility is a familiar concept, but having them so closely integrated is a much newer paradigm, Lewellen says. And the concept will extend beyond the walls of the wellness center; it’s intended to serve as the hub of a health ecosystem in New Albany, incorporating restaurants, grocery stores, retail businesses for such health-related items as shoes and bicycles, schools, and more.
“We believe this is the model of the future,” Lewellen says. “It’s my belief that (with) health care, the whole continuum will be delivered in communities.”
At the community level, personalized health care creates an environment in which it’s appealing and normal to take health seriously and take advantage of all the opportunities provided to do so, Marsh says. New Albany’s stalwart commitment to health and wellness makes it the perfect place to pilot this new approach to health care, he says.
“Our goal is to learn with the community leaders and the community members,” he says.
If the minds behind the wellness center have their way, New Albany won’t be the only community to reap the benefits. Different communities have different needs, and the co-located wellness center approach may not work for everyone, but organizers hope to be able to bring their version of personalized health care to other areas that want to improve their overall health.
“If there are other communities that we go into, which we would very much love to do, the important thing is to bring the right ingredients to that community to help us raise its health,” says Lewellen.
Garth Bishop is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at laurand@cityscenemediagroup.com.
