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How Mindful Innovation is Accelerating the Rate of Health & Performance in the Enterprise

By Les C. Meyer

Our Mindful Innovation vision is to refine organization health strategies, reveal population health improvement interventions and weigh productive advantage business models to improve the economic wellbeing and quality of life of consumers worldwide.

“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it,” wrote author James Balldwin. Mindful innovators lead by example and steer cross-functional work teams toward relentlessly fostering a people-centric, trust-based organization health culture as a way to raise the bar on individual productivity, promote financial security aspirations, and align meaningful incentives, consumer information and choices.  

Our MI attitude to think the unthinkable with board chairs — and making the invisible visible with CEOs — continues to drives business success and provide a pathway to achieve competitive advantage and optimize commitments to accelerate organization health action plans and workforce health achievement.

For example, we recently interviewed Aetna’s Chairman and CEO Mark T. Bertolini in Corporate Wellness Magazine. In my article: “Forget ROI:  A CEOs Perspective on Functionality” we emphasized Bertolini’s MI attitude and his mindful intent to transform health and performance improvement innovation around the world — and achieving optimal healthy workplace realization —making healing as important as curing. I reinforced the incisive MI value on investment (VOI) imperative that mindfulness, resilience, vitality and sustainability trumps return on investment ROI rhetoric every time.  

Our MI community-based, accountable care communities’ collective impact work with the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) Employer-Community Collaboration Committee continues its rapid homeland-focused expansion with CEOs nationwide in 2015.
 
Our MI contribution included the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities” initiative which recently brought together business and health care thought leaders for a kick-off event that was co-hosted by Jerry Noyce, CEO, HERO and HERO committee co-chair Nico Pronk, PhD with HealthPartners in Minneapolis, MN.

During this meeting, community health and business leaders worked to identify a collective mindset around the business benefit for employers in advancing health at the community level and the perspective that achieving health objectives (such as reducing obesity, improving physical activity, and managing chronic disease) will be very difficult without the business community’s active engagement. The significance of health improvement as a factor of business success, and a need to understand the elements of the business case are becoming increasingly clear to many stakeholders.

MI is driving change and accelerating the rate of health and performance improvement innovation leadership in America and around the globe. Our cutting edge methods and innovations performance improvement process tackles the tough organization health challenges impacting enterprise-wide growth, profitability and customer experience optimization to help drive improving value on investment in health care through ground-breaking collective impact methods and sustainable MI leadership engagement innovations.

According to Catherine Baase, MD, global director for health services for The Dow Chemical Company and co-chair of the HERO committee that created “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities,” the goal is to simultaneously drive business success and community-level health improvement through employer leadership, and to give employers across the country the business insight, knowledge and resources to drive change in their communities, thereby producing better business outcomes and healthier communities.

“When the business community has a compelling business case and the framework for action, great things happen,” said Baase. Together, the organizations that are involved in ‘Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities’ will move further and faster, by developing guidance and online resources to help companies of all sizes get involved in community health in a meaningful way that also benefits their own bottom line and business priorities.” 

“To maintain global competitiveness and help to achieve health in our communities, American companies must encourage healthy behavior with every tool in our toolkit,” said Baase.

Furthermore, “national and international science and policy organizations have concluded that employers and workplaces are absolutely essential to achieving health for society,” stated Baase, during her recent testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committees on behalf of the American Benefits Council.  

Dr. Baase described how Dow has woven its health efforts into the fabric of its organization. “Since 2004 we have improved the health risk profile of our global population substantially. Dow spent $4.8 million less in 2013 U.S. health care costs than we would have spent had we experienced the industry average trend.”

“A healthy workforce is a productive workforce, and a productive workforce makes for a healthier American economy,” said Baase.