Incorporating Lifestyle Medicine Into a Large Health Care System: The Orlando Health Experience
Dr. Rippe is the Director of the Lifestyle Medicine Initiative at Orlando Health and leads a collaborative partnership to bring Lifestyle Medicine to Central Florida through the Lifestyle Medicine Initiative at Orlando Health. This article describes how Orlando Health, and its initiative to incorporate lifestyle medicine concepts into its core operating principles. Great progress has been made in the past 18 months in this initiative although numerous challenges remain. The authors enumerate both progress and challenges. They hope the experience at Orlando Health will challenge and inspire other health care systems to also take a more proactive stance in incorporating lifestyle medicine into their culture and core operating principles.
Dr. Rippe leads the first "Lifestyle Medicine Rounds From Orlando Health." The purpose of these rounds is to explore how the principles of lifestyle medicine can be applied to the care of hospitalized patients and to demonstrate how lifestyle medicine can be incorporated into traditional medical education venues. Orlando Health is the first hospital healthcare system to embrace lifestyle medicine as a core operating principle.
Lifestyle Medicine and Health Care Reform
Dr. Rippe and colleagues express in this editorial, that until prescription of positive lifestyle practices becomes a central component of modern American medicine, we are unlikely to improve outcomes or control costs of health care in the United States. We entered health care in the first place to make a difference in people's lives. Forming true partnerships with our patients and offering evidence-based advice on how daily habits and actions profoundly affect long-term health is overdue. In this regard, there is no time to waste. Lifestyle medicine really is true health care reform and must be put into practice immediately, beginning within the medical community itself.
