Hats off to CentraCare Health’s initiative dubbed Triple Aim, an effort to help people in central Minnesota become healthier by choosing wiser day-to-day lifestyles.
The cost of health care, no matter which system of insurance evolves, is going to become astronomically expensive, even more than it is now. As the huge number of baby boomers age, those costs will rapidly accelerate. It’s a frightening prospect.
The good news is if we start improving our health now, the medical care needed will be less, saving costs, saving lives.
The Triple Aim has three components: improving the health of people in the area, improving experiences of patients, lowering the costs of health care.
In a recent “Report to the Community,” CentraCare President and CEO Dr. Ken Holmen outlined Triple Aim.
CentraCare will join with other area health-care organizations to promote well-being for one and all. One such program, a CentraCare program, is “Better Living, Exercise and Nutrition Daily,” dubbed BLEND. The original goal of BLEND was to reduce child-obesity rates by 10 percent within 10 years. It achieved that goal, among other goals, in only eight years. BLEND encourages healthy nutrition, exercise, tobacco cessation and other good habits that bring about overall good outcomes.
Triple Aim will involve all people in cities and rural areas of central Minnesota, including schools, churches, teachers, political leaders, businesses and organizations. All of those entities and people have enormous power to influence others for the better, and that includes health choices on a day-to-day basis.
CentraCare, a non-profit, invests lots of money in programs to promote health. It also works hard to initiate cost-saving methods in health care, as well as programs to enhance the doctor-patient relationship, which is another way to enhance and reinforce healthy lifestyles.
Bad nutrition, lack of exercise, too much indulgence in alcohol or tobacco are virtual recipes for health problems. Naturally, as people develop health problems because of those bad choices, that translates into earlier and more severe onsets of diseases and other health crises. Those, in turn, cause higher and higher costs for health care, and ultimately all of us share in paying those costs, many of which are passed on in one way or another.
That is why Triple Aim is such good “medicine,” so to speak. Hopefully, the initiative will raise awareness (the all-important first step), and then people can begin a step at a time to act upon that awareness by eating less and more nutritiously, by starting an exercise regimen even if it’s only brisk walks in the neighborhood, by getting enough sleep and by getting regular medical check-ups to nip problems in the bud before they morph into major (and expensive-to- treat) problems.
The beauty of it is this: improved lifestyles lead to healthier and happier people, and together (healthier, happier) we can achieve a better, more functional society while saving enormous expenditures on health care. Triple Aim could be a win-win-win for all of us. Three cheers for Triple Aim.
