CDC Promotes Health as Effective Health System Reform

Apr 30, 2008 by Elizabeth Ziegler

(KCPW News) Efforts to fix the nation's health-care crisis are largely ignoring health promotion as a means to lasting reform, says Brad Perkins, the chief strategy and innovation officer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Where is health in the health-care debate?" Perkins asks. "Most of the current conversation is about access, which is about insurance, and cost and quality, and those are only part of the conversation that needs to occur because so much of health is created outside of health-care, through the environment that we live in and through the choices that we make."

Perkins says the CDC's vision for transforming the struggling health system includes the concept of upstream protection, which values health promotion as well as the system's current focus on diagnosis and treatment. He says health should be included in every level of decision making - from federal policy decisions to state, local and even personal decisions. The CDC calls this approach "health in all policies." Furthermore, he says it will be important to persuade community and business leaders to provide opportunities for people to make healthier decisions, such as quitting smoking, eating healthier, and even graduating from high school. Finally, he says the CDC wants to create a index to measure health on a national and local level, much like the Dow Jones Industrial Index, or Consumer Price Index.

"Not only do we have to start thinking about health and the context of policies outside of health care, like agriculture, housing and transportation," Perkins says. "But we need to have leaders and employers outside of health and health care start taking responsibility for health - health of their employees, the families of their employees and the communities where their families live."

Perkins says policy makers need to understand that it could take decades to see the impact of this type of systemic change. The CDC officer lectured on health system reform Tuesday as part of Intermountain Healthcare's Healthy Dialogues series.

Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2008 KCPW