TEDMED Great Challenges: We Won, Now What?

You may have heard the news that “Inventing Wellness Programs That Work” was voted as the number one health care challenge, out of fifty, that the TEDMED community wants to focus on solving. The ShapeUp team had great fun advocating for this challenge down in Washington, D.C. at the historic Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where we handed out cards about the importance of wellness programs, stuck bright red challenge #22 stickers on as many badges as we could, and talked up our belief that wellness programs are a real and viable solution to major problems that we face including sedentary lifestyles, the obesity epidemic, and rising health care costs. Thanks to the support of so many TEDMED delegates and online supporters, who all agreed with us, we put wellness programs over the top and landed a prominent spot in the national health care debate.

TEMED, along with its partner the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has promised that the winning challenges will be offered a platform through which to bring people together, facilitate conversations, and help advance our collective understanding and knowledge about the particular topic. While the details of exactly how this will happen are still emerging, I thought I would share what I hope we can accomplish together.

I hope that, together, we can have a grand, multi-disciplinary conversation about how we can make wellness programs faster, better, and cheaper. Faster through more rapid development, testing, evaluation, and dissemination. Better in the sense of higher participation, longer sustained engagement, more clinically significant outcomes, and greater participant satisfaction. Cheaper by way of higher scalability, greater use of technology to overcome infrastructure hurdles, and crowdsourcing.

I’m honored to be the TEDMED spokesperson for this challenge, and I’m looking forward to including all of you in the conversation. There are so many passionate individuals and organizations working in this space to solve this problem, and I’m so excited to see what the result of our collective wisdom will be. This effort promises to be engaging, productive, lively, and fun. Please join us for the journey.You can start by letting me know, in the comments section below, your thoughts on the following questions:

• Which organizations and people should be invited to join the conversation about how to invent wellness programs that work?
• On which aspects of wellness programs should we focus the conversation?
• Through which formats should this conversation take place?
• Where do you think wellness programs have the most room for improvement?
• What new trends, advances, or approaches do you think hold the most promise for making wellness programs faster, better, and cheaper?