About the WIN

About the Wellness Initiative for the Nation (WIN)

The purpose of the Wellness Initiative for the Nation (WIN) is to proactively prevent disease and illness, promote health and productivity and create well-being and flourishing for the people of America. The WIN concept paper addresses strategies for creating health, saving costs and enhancing wellness through a concerted focus on self-care, core lifestyle change and integrative health care practices. In addition, WIN can prevent the looming fiscal disaster in our health care system.

The initial step towards a WIN is to create a White House office, with a Director and staff, specifically focused on developing policies and programs for lifestyle-based chronic disease prevention and management, integrative health care practices and health promotion.

Health Care Community Discussion

A draft of the WIN concept was discussed by over 100 participants in a Health Care Community Discussion in December 2008 at the Samueli Institute. Dozens of these expert participants provided specific edits and comments on the draft document, many of which were incorporated into the final version of the WIN paper. A full report from this Health Care Community Discussion is posted here.

Development of the WIN concept

The WIN document was developed by leaders in the fields of health policy, health promotion, lifestyle-based chronic disease prevention and management and integrative health care practices. The policies and programs of WIN are grounded in the definition of health as a dynamic continuum across the lifecycle, the prevention of illness through enhancing self-care, and the prudent use of integrative health care approaches that have demonstrated effectiveness. WIN leadership will provide program analysis, develop policies, guide curriculum and evidence standards, and establish incentives and mechanisms that support these efforts in national health care reform.

WIN proposes a national effort to create:

  • A network of Systems Wellness Advancement Teams (SWAT) to maintain the wellness vision and guide implementation of a new paradigm based on health promotion, disease prevention and integrative practices.
  • Professional health and wellness coaches and a health corps;
  • Economic and other incentives for personal and community activities that establish social and cultural change and create public wellness values and a flourishing society; and
  • A health and wellness information toolkit for providing evidence based information on illness prevention and self-management.

Alignment of the WIN

We have aligned WIN concepts with the overarching goals of the following concepts, policies and documents:

  • The Obama-Biden plan for health reform (application/pdf, 82.1 kB, info), specifically the goal to promote prevention and strengthen public health (see page 7)
  • The new administration’s health reform recommendations, described in The Health Care Delivery System: A Blueprint for Reform;
  • Healthy People 2010 goals, specifically the focal areas on Increasing Quality and Years of Healthy Life and Eliminating Health Disparities;
  • A Wellness Trust, described in Promoting prevention and preempting costs: A new wellness trust for the United States;
  • The Federal Health Reserve described by Senator Daschle and proposed in Bill S. 2105 (application/pdf, 168.4 kB, info) (9/27/2007) [link to PDF]
  • Recommendations of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy;
  • The Institute of Medicine’s reports on health care quality, transformation, and integrative medicine.

Thus, the WIN concept fits directly into the plans of the new administration and leaders in health care reform.

Better Health, Lower Cost: Bending the Cost Curve

We created a supplemental document to the WIN to showcase examples from the areas of health promotion, public health, prevention and integrative health care where research has demonstrated their value in producing better health at lower cost.  This document called Better Health, Lower Cost: Bending the Cost Curve (application/pdf, 1.7 MB, info) highlights alternative and integrative approaches that are low cost relative to current practice, enhance health across the spectrum of health and illness, can be widely applied and used and are as effective as higher cost approaches.  

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