19/12/2019 | BlogPost
Lifestyle as medicine
Kristin Milburn | Global Head of Digital Health Partnerships
There’s nothing new about the idea that diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors impact our health and wellness. What’s new is leveraging digital technologies to help encourage us in those pursuits.
It’s an aspect of digital health or ‘lifestyle as medicine’ that has the ability to empower consumers to improve their health and provides additional ways for physicians to make more specific and helpful recommendations.
We know that behavioural aspects of our day to day life are important to our overall health and wellbeing, and digital can help provide access to advice and information in a way never before possible.
For example, the Pioppi Protocol, whose development was based on a documentary called The Big Fat Fix, provides guidance based on the lifestyles of those in a small fishing village in the south of Italy, Pioppi, where inhabitants typically live 10 years longer than counterparts in other areas of the world. Learning from this village, codifying what makes their lifestyles healthier than average, and then serving it up in a way that is accessible to others around the world is the power and scale we can access via digital.
We’re expecting to see more partnerships between pharma and ‘lifestyle as medicine’ start-ups as value-based models provide incentives to ensure we stay happier and healthier
The pharmaceutical industry has long known lifestyle factors can greatly impact outcomes across a variety of, if not all, therapeutic areas and so would dutifully include some mention of diet and exercise in patient support programmes, but that was typically a tick-box exercise.
Now, the rise of digital health solutions provides numerous opportunities to assist patients in a more meaningful way to improve their health, be it through nutrition or diet recommendations, exercises or stress reduction.
Let’s explore how ‘lifestyle as medicine’ is beginning to play out.
| If you are interested in knowing more about this topic, read the full article at www.pharmaphorum.com |
A 20+ year veteran of consulting and digital marketing, Kristin Milburn’s experience has had a consistent focus on healthcare and technology and the intersection of the two. She is a strategic and innovative thinker, who has held leadership roles in strategy/planning and client engagement at various digital firms with numerous Fortune 100 pharmaceutical and technology clients. Kristin is now the global head of digital health partnerships at Healthware Group working to help advance the growing field of digital health and digital therapeutics by forging meaningful connections between start-ups, biopharma, tech firms and beyond.
