Empowering communities to improve population health
Blue Zones has been around for a couple of decades. Can you describe some of the work you’ve been doing to address health outside of the four walls of the hospital?
Blue Zones is a company that works on transformations for whole communities and for organizations by helping to bring in nine secrets of longevity and happiness that were discovered by its founder and National Geographic Fellow, Dan Buettner. He was supported by a science team from the National Institute on Aging and sent around the world to find the non-genetic related places where people live the longest, the best. And from that work, he wrote several best-selling books. The contents of that evidence base have been used to create a reverse engineering for our American communities to try to increase what has been a trending effect on both the growth in disease and the shortening of our lives here.
In April 2020, Adventist Health acquired Blue Zones. How and why does that kind of union come together?
It’s really interesting what’s taken place, particularly over the last 10 or 12 years. Not-forprofit health systems are required under their tax status to contribute back to the communities that they’re serving beyond the traditional acute-care scope of work, which means trying to find the right way to invest those dollars in a meaningful way to lift up the health and well-being of everyone in their markets. And there’s been a lot of formal work done and advancement around community health needs assessment, which is getting better at pointing out the problems we face. But there was difficulty because, traditionally, hospitals and clinics were not set up with mechanisms or infrastructure to pursue creating this type of change.
What are some of the opportunities and challenges you’ve faced integrating Blue Zones into Adventist?
Adventist has made a bold commitment to its communities, expecting to invest $1 billion over the next 10 years through community benefit, gifts, grants and partnerships. Even though that resourcing is there, the real hard lift is working with the existing business and infrastructure of hospitals and clinics to collaborate and build coalitions, because this is not work you do to a community. It’s a body of work that you empower a community to do for itself.
We bring experts. We bring tools. We bring process. We bring funding and resources. But the biggest challenge is that it’s awkward, at best, for most providers to step out into the community and do this work. We’re in the phase of rolling out six communities concurrently across a footprint. That’ll grow to 25 over the next three years. The early work is putting in the relationship and governance structure with a community, and