Introducing 2022: The Year of Growth

Growing the care continuum of health focused medicine

Each year at the Evolution of Medicine we pick a theme for the year ahead. I can’t explain exactly how we picked hyper-prescient “Resilience” in December 2019 for 2020, but I can share that it has helped us build content, assets and education about a particular relevant theme each year.

The theme last year was “Reinvention” and over the year we showcased how innovators were reinventing medicine in what we hoped was the shadow of the pandemic. Our 2022 theme is “Growth” and for a community of humans who also happen to be health professionals this will definitely mean practice growth and clinical growth, but will likely include some personal growth too… and if we all play our cards right… the exponential growth of the movement to put health at the center of healthcare.

For my first newsletter of 2022 I wanted to stimulate our thinking about what optimal care looks like, and the stimulus for this post came from a slightly unlikely place. A friend of mine started a mental health focused psychedelic medicine ecosystem called Woven Science and this is the diagram on their homepage to showcase where their organization is investing.

What struck me so clearly was the relevance of this diagram to the health medicine movement. (Note to readers: Whilst I have spent the last 8 years firmly in the functional medicine space, part of my year of growth is building alliances in allied ecosystems and, with appropriate credit to Dr Joe Pizzorno, I am going to use “health medicine” in this context to align all of those practicing inside the salutogenic paradigm)

So much of the focus in functional medicine has been on R+D (research on new supplements), diagnosis (innovative lab testing) and treatment (protocol) that we have under-focused on the other areas of this diagram that are critical to reinventing medicine around health.

Over the years we have showcased the practice management strategies of physicians innovating in “preparation / pre-screening” segment. As an example Dr. Sachin Patel using DISC personality scoring for all new patients and educating them accordingly comes to mind straight away.

But the “integration” and “community / mental health stability” segments have been sorely lacking. My challenge to our community is to “grow” our clinical care paradigms to include all of the segments in the diagram.

Right from the start of the Evolution of Medicine, partly due to the history of my co-founder, we have focused on health coaching as a way to help patients “integrate” the protocols. Many clinics have taken this advice, but the vast majority of clinics still operate solely in the “diagnosis” and “treatment” segments of the diagram, to the detriment of the long term health of the patient. One of the biggest barriers to this has been working out how health coaches can be paid for, something we have solved inside the payer system at HealCommunity. What other ways can we facilitate true integration of the medicine?

Finally the “community / mental health stability” segment. Could this be any more crucial? Not only has our pandemic policy caused the biggest shift in mental health stability in a generation, but community has been slowly eroded for the last 200 years, something I discussed in my book The Community Cure (Click for free audiobook, my gift to you!) In that book I argue that healthcare is the place where we should rebuild community. Lonely, disconnected people end up in the healthcare system and there is already budget allocated for supporting them (Medicare, Medicaid, Workers Comp, etc.) Real community solves loneliness and creates optimal support and accountability systems for activating into healthy habits consistently and combatting unhealthy environments, food or otherwise.

This graphic reinforced why we spent the last two years building HealCommunity to support clinicians across medicine in the “integration” and “community” segments. In particular, it reinforced one of the graphics I created to showcase what I felt like was happening in many functional medicine practices.

The red line depicts the patient who visits a practitioner, gets motivated enough (often by fear) to start the protocol and sees good results in the short term. Sadly though, as adherence dwindles so do outcomes. Fives years later, their health is marginally better than when they started, if at all.

Compare that to someone (pink line) who doesn’t do any lab testing or supplements, but gets activated into doing healthy behaviors every day. They go to bed on time, sleep well, change their diet, adopt some basic stress management strategies and move regularly. It may take them longer to achieve better health, but their intrinsic motivation keeps them on the path, and a year or two down the line, the outcomes really start to diverge.

The optimal path for healing speed is the blue line, and we are helping clinics around the country access these outcomes by pairing individualized one on one care with virtual group support for lifestyle changes.

As healthcare shifts to value based care, the winners will be those providers, clinics and health systems that keep people well at the minimum possible cost. My challenge to all of us inside the health medicine ecosystem is to reconsider our care in this context. How do we affect the health of patients five years out… or 10 years out… or for a lifetime?

The answer lies in these other segments, and we look forward to supporting you in your growth in 2022.

Looking forward to your comments and what this might stimulate in you!