Prevention & Wellness @WHCC: Connecting Health and Happiness

Last week I spent a day and a half in DC for the World Health Care Congress. Besides participating in the launch of ChangeNow4Health Innovation xChange, I had a chance to attend several sessions related to wellness.

What was the most notable, in my opinion?

In the handful of sessions on consumer engagement that I dropped by, I found Humana's wellness projects to be some of the more prominent ones. In fact, the presentation of Grant Harrison, VP of Integrated Consumer Experience went as far as to frame the issue as "life + happiness vs. sickness + death".

Here is how Grant is framing happiness in the broadest possible terms:

• Peace of Mind
• Buying down street value
• Making things easier to use
• Providing health information 

Once we start put health into the framework of happiness it becomes quite clear why Humana, a health benefit company is backing the projects such as:

1. Games for Health
   There is a movement underway to develop gaming applications to foster health engagement, which I wrote about this earlier. The upcoming Games for Health conference (May 8-9) is co-sponsored by Humana which has several gaming projects in development, including Horsepower Challenge.
2. Mobile Devices for Health
   This is something I wrote about quite extensively, having some excellent material from Texting 4 Health conference, put on by CDC and Stanford Persuasion Lab. One Humana project highlighted in Grant's presentation is Virtual Me, which is mobile health portal focused on behavior change.
3. Health Meets Green
   A way to think about this is how the health of people connects with the health of the planet. My Body My Planet program is about helping consumers connect sustainable lifestyle with health. Freewheelin is a specific project to encourage biking / ridesharing for employees.

If we think how projects of this type could represent the future of healthcare it is not hard to get an idea of what of the Innovation xChange could accomplish with your help.

If you have not done so yet, Submit Your Idea of how to link health with happiness!