The Power of Prevention in a Pandemic

It’s early May and we just surpassed 3.8 million confirmed cases and 264,000 deaths worldwide from the COVID-19 virus. The U.S., by far, has the most cases and the highest number of deaths despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Tragic from any perspective. Early in this pandemic, two population segments were identified as being most vulnerable – not to contracting the virus, but to dying from it:

1. those age 65+
2. those with serious underlying medical conditions

Certainly, we can’t control our age. Nor can we self-remedy underlying medical conditions like asthma, kidney disease, or being immunocompromised. But obesity? High blood pressure? Diabetes? Many forms of cancer, heart and lung disease? These medical conditions are largely impacted by our personal lifestyle choices… meaning we own a considerable degree of responsibility over the severity in which they affect us, the risk we impart on others, and the burden we thrust on our healthcare workers.

The CDC reports that 75% of the annual U.S. healthcare spend – or $2.7 trillion – is forfeited due to chronic diseases that are generally avoidable and preventable. And with COVID-19, the lifestyle choices each of us have made to date – from our eating habits and tobacco use to our physical activity and alcohol consumption – will, if infected, determine to some extent who lives and who dies. Could this COVID-19 event become the defining wake-up call that convinces us to begin to take greater responsibility and ownership for our health?

One phenomenon begging for an answer is how have so many people remained so deeply committed to sheltering in place, social distancing and mask wearing – all significant behavior changes requested of them? One critical reason is scorekeeping. Throughout each day we’re updated with the numeric impact of our actions: the number of cases, the number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths, the number of gowns, face shields, hospital beds, etc. Ongoing, simplified, real-time, numeric feedback in scoreboard format is a key motivator for staying committed to a cause or goal.

Committing and adhering to healthy personal behavior changes also requires immediate numeric feedback to tell us “yes”, your efforts are paying dividends. Today, literally thousands of digital health apps are just a click away on a Smartphone, providing access to health content, tips and knowledge. But there’s little evidence that’s driving long-term, sustained healthy behavior change. What if along with that readily available knowledge, there was a simple, single universally accepted number each of us could see at any given moment to “know” how healthy we were? A scientifically proven health score for example – using up to 100 health data points – that increased or decreased each day based on the healthy or unhealthy lifestyle choices we made… like a FICO score for our health. And what if along with the knowledge, and real-time health score, the needed guidance, engaging feedback and motivation were instantly delivered throughout the day to assist each of us on our new healthier path?

Surely equipping us with a numeric score of our health in real-time that reflected our daily healthy lifestyle choices, and provided relevant, easy and fun health improvement assistance that we could easily adopt would have public health, financial and “stickiness” value.

It is not a case of if, but when another wave of COVID-19 or some other highly contagious and deadly infection sweeps across the planet. Thankfully, it appears round one in this current fight may be waning, which will allow the collective world to return to its corner and retool its battle plan. And hopefully, three invaluable lessons-learned will guide societies and individuals to be better prepared for round two or the next foe:

1. Systemically, we must build a coordinated global vaccination, testing and tracing system, and strengthen the capacity for medical equipment and facilities.
2. Societally, governments and/or health insurers need to make prevention-focused digital health scoring easily available to their constituents, so improved health status can be reached before the next battle and sustained beyond it.
3. Individually, we must humbly acknowledge and accept ownership for our health and take responsibility for how our personal lifestyle choices truly impact the lives of everyone around us.

Soberingly, life or death in round two will rest upon our commitment to these change agents.

About the author:

Barry Pailet is Vice President at dacadoo, a leading health-technology company providing global health and life insurers with a comprehensive digital health engagement platform to engage their members in active and healthy lifestyle behaviors. He has over 30 years of leadership experience in the prevention and wellness industry with multi-national employers, health insurers, and health-technology companies. The dacadoo patented Health Score, is a number between 0–1,000 that changes in real-time for each individual, providing an easy-to-understand measure of their health based on lifestyle, body and mind. The Health Score is based on more than 300 million person-years of clinical data and is comprised of up to 100 individual health data points.