Obtaining The Way To Wellville: Modest Cities Compete To Get More healthy In Esther Dyson"s Most current Venture

Esther Dyson and her team are looking for a few good towns—five, to be precise—that want to take part in a grand experiment. Dyson, a tech investor named by Time magazine as one of the 10 most influential women in technology, wants to enlist small cities in a friendly competition to figure out how communities can become healthier places inhabited by healthier residents.

Here’s the idea: After going through a competitive selection process, five small cities or counties—each with a population of 100,000 or less—will be chosen to spend the next five years finding “The Way to Wellville,” as Dyson and her partners call the contest. So far, 10 finalists have been chosen, places like Scranton, Pennsylvania; Greater Muskegon, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Lake County, California. (A map showing the full list is here.)

The Way to Wellville tour stopped July 22 in Clatsop County, Oregon, where Clatsop Community Action’s food bank operates the community garden seen in the background. Last year, the community garden harvested 6,000 pounds of fresh produce that was distributed to hungry people in the area.

To run the challenge, Dyson created a small organization with the catchy, if slightly alarming, acronym of HICCup. The Health Initiative Coordinating Council, its full name, will assist the winning contestants in their journey to Wellville. Dyson will help bankroll the effort—she’s put in about $ 200,000 so far—and is part of the selection group choosing the final five. They’re now in the midst of a 10-city tour visiting each of the finalists and plan to announce the winners in mid-August.

Dyson’s team will help the chosen five raise money and provide an expert “navigator” to assist each town as they build a local local coalition by bringing many parties together—community advocates, health policy wonks, medical providers, local business leaders, finance experts—to develop and execute a health-improvement plan.

The contest will turn the five chosen communities into real-world, small-town laboratories. The hope is that by focusing on community-wide prevention and wellness efforts, each town will achieve real gains on a series of metrics that measure the health of the community and its people. Several of the 10 finalists have previous experience developing local health coalitions in conjunction with federal or private prevention grants. Overall metrics will be established at the start of the project for all five, with one individualized “wild card” metric for each community.

When it’s all over, Dyson told me, “I hope American health”—and not just the healthcare system—“will be changed. I hope there will be a visible impact that inspires people and actual, useful scientific data” that can be broadly shared.

Carrot harvest day at the community garden.

The project’s idea and goals are solidly in the tradition of place-based efforts to improve local health pioneered by the Healthy Communities movement when it started some 25 years ago in Boston, Colorado, South Carolina and 20 California cities. Those efforts, which continue with support of funders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Convergence Partnership, focus on the links between the health of a community and its environment—including transportation, land use and access to healthy food and activity. Community Transformation Grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have helped local areas pursue the same kinds of local change and improvement since 2010. In fact, several of the 10 Wellville finalist cities received support from this federal program and a predecessor.

Dyson’s innovation is to take a more entrepreneurial approach that incorporates new technology and encourages collaboration with investors, as well as philanthropists and community stakeholders. For her, the concept was inspired by an idea she once heard floated to use small towns as laboratories for health innovation and improvement. Since it never came to pass, she decided—and publicly announced—she would do it herself.

“Then I had to figure out what I had gotten myself into,” she laughs. She convened a series of brainstorming meetings to develop the concept. In the process, she met and hired Rick Brush, a former Cigna Cigna health insurance executive who has spent the last several years looking at ways to create market-based incentives that lead to improvements in the health not just of individuals, but of whole communities. As HICCup’s CEO, part of his job will be to help the communities work with health insurers and investors who hope to generate revenue by reducing spending on healthcare costs.

“Our DNA is connected to the market-based approach.” Brush told me. “The business models that demonstrate an impact on producing better health at a community level are the ones that are going to succeed.”

The project has moved rapidly since the call for applications was issued April 10. Forty-two applicants submitted by the May 23 deadline; since then the six-member selection committee has narrowed the pool to 10 finalists. The five winners will be selected in mid-August after site visits to the final candidates that are now underway.

The contest will raise help each town raise its visibility, helping attract publicity and financial support. Brush estimates each town will need to raise $ 15 million to $ 50 million in cash and in-kind contributions to fund community transformation efforts. HICCup’s navigators will help them apply best practices in the areas of prevention and health-improvement and make use of cutting-edge technology.

The HICCup team will also develop three networks of partners. The first will be a “health mart” to include startups and companies like IBM IBM that are developing health apps and IT systems as well as national retailers like Walmart and Walgreens that want to “assess whether they can create a market for healthy foods,” says Brush.

A second network will help the towns attract capital and develop new kinds of sustainable financing that can pay for health-improvement efforts over the five years of the contest and beyond. One approach is social impact bonds—financing vehicles that raise money from private investors to address conditions like moldy homes or polluted air that perpetuate asthma. If the people’s health improves, reducing healthcare costs, the investors get some of the savings back as profit.

Obtaining The Way To Wellville: Modest Cities Compete To Get More healthy In Esther Dyson"s Most current Venture

Locating The Way To Wellville: Modest Cities Compete To Get Healthier In Esther Dyson"s Latest Venture

Esther Dyson and her team are looking for a few good towns—five, to be precise—that want to take part in a grand experiment. Dyson, a tech investor named by Time magazine as one of the 10 most influential women in technology, wants to enlist small cities in a friendly competition to figure out how communities can become healthier places inhabited by healthier residents.

Here’s the idea: After going through a competitive selection process, five small cities or counties—each with a population of 100,000 or less—will be chosen to spend the next five years finding “The Way to Wellville,” as Dyson and her partners call the contest. So far, 10 finalists have been chosen, places like Scranton, Pennsylvania; Greater Muskegon, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and Lake County, California. (A map showing the full list is here.)

The Way to Wellville tour stopped July 22 in Clatsop County, Oregon, where Clatsop Community Action’s food bank operates the community garden seen in the background. Last year, the community garden harvested 6,000 pounds of fresh produce that was distributed to hungry people in the area.

To run the challenge, Dyson created a small organization with the catchy, if slightly alarming, acronym of HICCup. The Health Initiative Coordinating Council, its full name, will assist the winning contestants in their journey to Wellville. Dyson will help bankroll the effort—she’s put in about $ 200,000 so far—and is part of the selection group choosing the final five. They’re now in the midst of a 10-city tour visiting each of the finalists and plan to announce the winners in mid-August.

Dyson’s team will help the chosen five raise money and provide an expert “navigator” to assist each town as they build a local local coalition by bringing many parties together—community advocates, health policy wonks, medical providers, local business leaders, finance experts—to develop and execute a health-improvement plan.

The contest will turn the five chosen communities into real-world, small-town laboratories. The hope is that by focusing on community-wide prevention and wellness efforts, each town will achieve real gains on a series of metrics that measure the health of the community and its people. Several of the 10 finalists have previous experience developing local health coalitions in conjunction with federal or private prevention grants. Overall metrics will be established at the start of the project for all five, with one individualized “wild card” metric for each community.

When it’s all over, Dyson told me, “I hope American health”—and not just the healthcare system—“will be changed. I hope there will be a visible impact that inspires people and actual, useful scientific data” that can be broadly shared.

Carrot harvest day at the community garden.

The project’s idea and goals are solidly in the tradition of place-based efforts to improve local health pioneered by the Healthy Communities movement when it started some 25 years ago in Boston, Colorado, South Carolina and 20 California cities. Those efforts, which continue with support of funders like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Convergence Partnership, focus on the links between the health of a community and its environment—including transportation, land use and access to healthy food and activity. Community Transformation Grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have helped local areas pursue the same kinds of local change and improvement since 2010. In fact, several of the 10 Wellville finalist cities received support from this federal program and a predecessor.

Dyson’s innovation is to take a more entrepreneurial approach that incorporates new technology and encourages collaboration with investors, as well as philanthropists and community stakeholders. For her, the concept was inspired by an idea she once heard floated to use small towns as laboratories for health innovation and improvement. Since it never came to pass, she decided—and publicly announced—she would do it herself.

“Then I had to figure out what I had gotten myself into,” she laughs. She convened a series of brainstorming meetings to develop the concept. In the process, she met and hired Rick Brush, a former Cigna Cigna health insurance executive who has spent the last several years looking at ways to create market-based incentives that lead to improvements in the health not just of individuals, but of whole communities. As HICCup’s CEO, part of his job will be to help the communities work with health insurers and investors who hope to generate revenue by reducing spending on healthcare costs.

“Our DNA is connected to the market-based approach.” Brush told me. “The business models that demonstrate an impact on producing better health at a community level are the ones that are going to succeed.”

The project has moved rapidly since the call for applications was issued April 10. Forty-two applicants submitted by the May 23 deadline; since then the six-member selection committee has narrowed the pool to 10 finalists. The five winners will be selected in mid-August after site visits to the final candidates that are now underway.

The contest will raise help each town raise its visibility, helping attract publicity and financial support. Brush estimates each town will need to raise $ 15 million to $ 50 million in cash and in-kind contributions to fund community transformation efforts. HICCup’s navigators will help them apply best practices in the areas of prevention and health-improvement and make use of cutting-edge technology.

The HICCup team will also develop three networks of partners. The first will be a “health mart” to include startups and companies like IBM IBM that are developing health apps and IT systems as well as national retailers like Walmart and Walgreens that want to “assess whether they can create a market for healthy foods,” says Brush.

A second network will help the towns attract capital and develop new kinds of sustainable financing that can pay for health-improvement efforts over the five years of the contest and beyond. One approach is social impact bonds—financing vehicles that raise money from private investors to address conditions like moldy homes or polluted air that perpetuate asthma. If the people’s health improves, reducing healthcare costs, the investors get some of the savings back as profit.

Locating The Way To Wellville: Modest Cities Compete To Get Healthier In Esther Dyson"s Latest Venture

We need to locate older faces gorgeous, says Esther Rantzen

“We should value older individuals far far more and recognise that we can learn from their useful expertise.

“Many older folks, who have been at the centre of their households, relied on in the workplace or local community – discover that with outdated age the tide goes out.

“They’re left stranded and turn into isolated.”

Ms Rantzen, 73, calls for far more new housing designed for older folks which would give them the needed assistance.

She said: “One of the clear techniques to help is to offer much more proper housing developments tailored for older individuals so they have the network to assistance their shifting demands.”

Last month Ms Rantzen accused Britain of getting to be “too busy” to uncover time for older people soon after The Silver Line received more than 100,000 calls in its 1st six months.

The former That is Lifestyle host stated the services was getting a “transformational” impact on 1000′s of men and women and had purchased to light as “huge and unmet need”.

Most callers lived alone and much more than half, 53 per cent, explained they had no one particular else to communicate to other than the helpline, a survey located.

Nearly half of callers frequently invested a lot more than a day without speaking to any person, and a lot more than one particular in 10 often invested a lot more than a week with no having a conversation.

Ms Rantzen launched the helpline right after revealing her very own feelings of loneliness when her husband, the documentary maker Desmond Wilcox, died.

“The shocking fact is that Britain has become as well hectic to find time for our older people,” she said. “Even our medical doctors, our carers, our higher streets and our households fail to recognise that what older folks need to have is time to speak, time to listen, time to worth them.

“Silver Line callers say that being encouraged to ring The Silver Line made all the big difference.”

We need to locate older faces gorgeous, says Esther Rantzen

Esther Dyson Has a Program to Improve America"s Health

By Adrienne Jane Burke, Wayne Lam and Adam Ludwig

“I’m wealthy and I’m obnoxious and I’m not eating this stuff,” Esther Dyson says of the sugar-filled yogurt currently being served for breakfast in the course of the latest DLD conference in New York City.

Dyson, a venture capitalist, digital age guru, and trained cosmonaut who, in golf shirt and jeans, comes across as neither wealthy nor obnoxious, tends to make the statement in an interview with Techonomy to help illustrate the issues most Americans face in preserving a wholesome diet regime. “Imagine residing in a small town exactly where there are only a bunch of chain stores. Typical folks with standard lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just get the things with sugar in it.” She appears forward to a day when you will not look obnoxious if you insist on healthier alternatives wherever you go.

The Way to Wellville, an initiative of the Wellness Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup) founded by Dyson, aims to alter that standing quo. You may, she acknowledges, consider the Way to Wellville a “cheesy contest.” It’s tough five little American communities (greatest population 100,000) to see which a single can most boost five measures of well being and financial vitality in excess of five many years. But actually, she says, the competitors is “a clinical trial of the proposition that if you want to make men and women wholesome you have to do a bunch of issues together: adjust their atmosphere, change college foods, have employer wellness, and handle diabetes. Doing all these factors collectively at vital density will bring a genuine and lasting influence.” Towns that want to be regarded as for the contest have till Friday, Might 23, to apply.

Dyson, best recognized as chairman of EDventure Holdings and an angel investor and advisor to healthcare, technology, and aerospace organizations, has focused her existence to breakthrough technologies that aims to substantially enhance the lives and well-currently being of humans. Her recent investments incorporate Omada Health, Healthloop, and IconAircraft.

But she says technologies is not the only resolution to improving health. “The issue that’s most broken about well being, as opposed to healthcare,” the straight-speaking Dyson says, “is that just about every thing is undermining people’s attempts to be healthier. You’re being undermined by marketing that sells you bad foods, you are getting undermined by vehicles and transportation, you are getting undermined by getting scared that if your little ones go outside and stroll to school they’ll be kidnapped.”

So she designed the non-revenue HICCup to inform and advertise wholesome living practices. The way it will decide the winner in the Way to Wellness contest, she says, will be by “collecting data up the wazoo.” The program will track information in each and every local community like aggregated grocery keep receipts per capita, amount of neighborhood sufferers with overall health troubles, miles walked by citizens, and the variety of men and women with bikes. “Publicizing that information is going to be huge,” she says.

Dyson hopes selecting a winner to The Way to Wellville will inspire other communities to adopt more healthy habits and life options.

Even though she says the challenge will leverage “collective action in small places” as opposed to “government intrusion,” she believes the Reasonably priced Care Act will have an affect on how individuals keep healthy, and offer you far better possibilities and experiences to people looking for health-related attention. One way the new act can assist men and women, she explains, is by educating them about how to avert their situations from worsening, so they can stay away from paying costly doctors’ bills. Dyson adds that HICCup will bolster the affect of the Reasonably priced Care Act by exhibiting “what it is that men and women should be having to pay for, like these extended-term community-wide interventions.” “The ACA incentivizes health companies to emphasis on local community overall health in general—not just educating them, but offering preventive providers and screenings, and so on,” says Dyson.

Because each communities has accessibility to different and limited resources, Dyson believes people must actively voice their opinions on what programs and assets their communities ought to offer. More effective transit techniques, a lot more nutritious school lunches, and bike sharing are just a few efforts and improvements Dyson believes would create much better healthier lives in America. She says nowadays we’re all collectively contributing to undermining our personal overall health, so we need to collectively figure out how to enhance it.

Esther Dyson Has a Program to Improve America"s Health

Remote manage – why the government has hit pause on the Care.information project | Esther Addley

Jeremy Hunt: he advised the Commons that it was appropriate for the organisers of the new Care-data scheme to delay its introduction. Photograph: Richard Gardner/Rex

Sharing overall health data is immensely essential, Jeremy Hunt reminded MPs. It was by learning lots of people’s healthcare information that medical doctors learned thalidomide was hazardous, that MMR was proved to have no hyperlink to autism, that we found smoking triggered cancer. And that was why the government had rummaged down the back of the sofa, identified the remote manage, and pressed pause on its prepare to gather the nation’s GP data.

It had been “completely proper” for the organisers of the new Care.information scheme to pause its rollout, the well being secretary informed the Commons. This would let them to put the kettle on, nip to the loo and win round the public to the prospect of their intimate medical info getting uploaded to a central database to be shared with outside bodies managed by men and women who seemed not completely clear what they were up to.

They like to get tiny comfort breaks at the Division of Health. You will recall that, in 2011, following extreme opposition from overall health experts, this government’s health bill was also paused to let a “listening workout” that led to the re-drafting of the bill. (Individuals who listened especially closely might even have heard the subsequent tap on the shoulder of Hunt’s predecessor Andrew Lansley, and Cameron’s whispered “You happen to be fired”.)

Labour leapt at the initial mention of “the pause”. “When we had a pause prior to, the result was a very great Overall health and Social Care Act!” countered Hunt. Shadow well being secretary Andy Burnham set his face to “scoff”. When Hunt was appointed, he had declared it his mission to have a information revolution but “the only revolution he has designed,” stated Burnham, “is a developing public revolt” towards the Care.data scheme.

This plainly could not stand. The opposition weren’t the only ones who could fling somewhat lame, pre-rehearsed insults across the dispatch box. “The shadow secretary of state searches for NHS crises with about as much achievement as George Bush looking for weapons of mass destruction!” stated Hunt, rather proud of that 1. Burnham flapped a copy of the “useless glossy leaflet” that suggested folks on their correct to opt out, the 1 the government explained had been obtained by each home but demonstrably had not.

Hunt flapped back: it was a bit wealthy for Labour to complain about the approach for opting out when the previous government hadn’t provided an opt-out selection at all. Happily, a number of hours later the opposing sides discovered typical ground, when MPs on the cross-party overall health choose committee united to deliver a spirited kicking to the Department of Well being, NHS England and the Wellness and Social Care Details Centre, the bodies overseeing the Care.information rollout. Why had the process been commenced with no any code of practice in place, asked Conservative Charlotte Leslie. “It appears like you have got a half-constructed machine.” Labour’s Rosie Cooper explained she had opted out of the scheme “Why? Simply because I never believe in you and I will not contemplate myself a commodity to be bartered close to by you.” By no means thoughts pressing pause, sounds like somebody needs a screwdriver and basic operating guidelines.

Remote manage – why the government has hit pause on the Care.information project | Esther Addley