Mitesh Patel, MD, MBA, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is a practicing physician at the Philadelphia Veteran Affairs Medical Center; and author of Clinical Wards Secrets, a guide for medical students transitioning from the classroom to the hospital wards. This post is part of the "Health Care in 2013" series.

While most people spend a few hours a year visiting the doctor, they spend another 5,000 waking hours without any direct contact from the U.S. health care system.  There has been an increasing amount of attention on how to design systems that encourage healthy behaviors among the population during their everyday activities.  Insights from behavioral economics provide opportunities to design systems that monitor, incentivize and provide feedback to encourage these changes. 

One proposal to change behavior is to increase price transparency in the U.S, with initiatives at the state and federal levels.  Lessons from other industries and concepts from behavioral economics demonstrate that this must be designed carefully to increase the likelihood that price transparency changes behavior. 

One example is the use of calorie-labeling in fast food restaurants.  While its intended outcome is to reduce consumer consumption, there are several reasons why it has thus far not been very successful. Consumers may not understand the caloric information or the problem may be self-control and not related to information at all. 

Using concepts from behavioral economics such as framing the information or making it more salient could improve its impact on reducing calorie consumption.

As the New Year approaches, millions of Americans will make resolutions to improve their diet, increase their exercise, or to quit smoking.  Let’s do our part to design systems that help our population meet their goals and increase healthy behavior. 

Jason Corburn, PhD, MCP, is associate professor at the School Public Health & Department of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley.  He is a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and an RWJF Health & Society Scholar. This post is part of the "Health Care in 2013" series.

The U.S. health care system must stop treating people only to send them back into the living, working and playing conditions that are making them sick in the first place. Glaring health inequities continue to persist in our metropolitan areas – differences in life expectancy, disease and disability by racial and ethnic groups and neighborhood location.  Our zip codes are often a greater predictor of our likelihood of disease, disability and early death than our genetic code.  We need to shift our health care system from a focus largely on cures to preventing illness and death by improving our living, working and playing environments.

2013 must be the year we all view community development and city planning as ‘preventative medicine.’

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) recently announced the establishment of the Young Leader Awards: Recognizing Leadership for a Healthier America. The awards will honor young leaders, 40 years of age and under, who offer great promise for leading the way to improved health and health care for all. Up to 10 awards of $40,000 will be granted to outstanding young leaders.

The Young Leader Awards will recognize emerging leaders who have demonstrated the characteristics needed to improve health and health care through leadership and innovation. These characteristics—a combination of personal attributes, commitment to health and health care, and successful experience—demonstrate an ability to lead and innovate and they signal the potential to become a greater leader in the coming years.

The Young Leader Awards are part of RWJF’s 40th anniversary celebration. Awardees will be announced in October.

To learn more about the qualifications or to nominate a Young Leader, visit http://RWJFyoungleaderawards.org.

Learn more about RWJF’s 40th anniversary.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

“Preventing diseases before they start is one of the most common sense ways to keep people healthy,” writes Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, RWJF president and CEO, in a blog post for The Atlantic, “but this nation continues to focus too narrowly on treating medical conditions after they occur.” Lavizzo-Mourey’s essay is part of the “America the Fixable” series, hosted by Atlantic.com in partnership with Common Good. See the full series here.

A study led by RWJF/U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) Clinical Scholar Charles Scales, MD, finds that the number of Americans suffering from kidney stones has nearly doubled since 1994, due in large part to the increase in obesity and diabetes, WTVD (Raleigh-Durham, N.C.) reports. “While we expected the prevalence of kidney stones to increase, the size of the increase was surprising,” Scales said. HealthDay also reported on the findings.

Kavita Patel, MD, MSHS, an alumna of the Clinical Scholars program, was a guest on NPR for a story that asked “Does Race Affect Your Hospital Stay?” The story keyed off findings from Sick in America, a poll commissioned by RWJF, NPR and the Harvard School of Public Health to better understand Americans’ experiences and attitudes related to the cost and quality of their medical care. Nearly half of respondents said that a lack of cultural understanding plays a big role in the problems with U.S. health care quality, the story reports.

Dominick L. Frosch, PhD, an alumnus of the RWJF Health & Society Scholars program, continues to receive media coverage for a study he led that finds some patients are afraid or feel they are unable to speak up and participate in shared decision making with their physicians. American Medical News and Forbes are among the outlets to report on the findings.

By Raina Merchant, MD, MSHP, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program alumna and assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania Department of Emergency Medicine

If the person next to you went into cardiac arrest, would you know what to do? Would you know where to find an automated external defibrillator (AED) to shock and restart their heart? Millions of public places across the United States have AEDs that can save lives – airports, casinos, churches, gyms and schools, among them – but most people don’t know where they’re located. Every second counts when someone’s heart stops beating, and time spent searching for an AED is time wasted in increasing the chances of survival.

Surprisingly, no one knows where all of the country’s AEDs are located. Requirements for AED reporting and registration vary widely by state, and no comprehensive map of their locations has ever been compiled. As a result, 911 dispatchers aren’t always able to direct callers to an AED in an emergency, and callers have no good way of quickly locating one on their own.

This week, I launched the MyHeartMap Challenge with a multidisciplinary team from the University of Pennsylvania. This pilot study will use social media and social networking tools to gather this critical public health data and create searchable maps of Philadelphia’s AEDs that can be used by health professionals and the general public.

The first step of our challenge is a Philadelphia-based community-wide contest. We’re asking Philadelphians to find and photograph AEDs over the next six weeks, and submit the photo and location to us via a mobile app or our website. You can also participate if you don’t live in Philadelphia by finding a creative way to use your social network or harness crowdsourcing.

As we head into 2012, the Human Capital Blog asked Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) staff, program directors, scholars and grantees to share their New Year’s resolutions for our health care system, and what they think should be the priorities for action in the New Year. This post is by Laura Brennaman, MSN, RN, CEN, a fellow at the RWJF Nursing and Health Policy Collaborative at the University of New Mexico.

As we enter 2012, my resolution and wish for the U.S. health care system is a fundamental and transformative shift from a focus on disease management to one of health promotion. As Americans and health professionals, we must recognize that even the most advanced and best interventions to remedy diseases do not improve the overall health status of our country. Only preventing epidemics of chronic problems like metabolic syndromes, heart disease, and lung disease that plague our population can have significant wellness and economic benefits.

The Affordable Care Act offers a mechanism to foster such a change in emphasis with the establishment of the National Council for Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health that intertwines the governance of 17 executive agencies. Leadership from diverse arenas such as transportation, trade, agriculture and labor concentrating on health promotion strategies from within and across domains provides opportunities to affect many of the determinants of poor health and transform them into positive scenarios to improve health status of all Americans.

Actualizing new health promotion strategies through shifting spending from direct care provision to prevention mechanisms of social programs like job training, housing supports, public transportation systems, and childcare services has greater potential to improve health outcomes for Americans than new technology or pharmaceuticals for disease management.

In this coming election year, the candidates for office will propose a bevy of ideas concerning health care. However, we must pay heed to all programs they propose to enhance or curtail through a lens of health outcomes. Proposals dealing with environment, energy and economic issues will affect our health as surely as any health care reform plan.

Hence, my resolution for our health care system is holistic and comprehensive consideration of the health impact of every policy. Through such integrated deliberation, we will achieve improvement in health outcomes and reductions in health disparities for all Americans.