In the latest episode of the HRchat show, Bill Banham talks with Esther Dyson, executive founder of the Way to Wellville, a decade-long, evidence-generating project devoted to understanding and testing models for cultivating community health that will return profits to investors and health to the participants and their communities. Esther is a speaker at this week’s Thrive Summit from Virgin Pulse in New Orleans.
Listen to this Episode of the HRchat Podcast and Discover:
* Why should employers invest in the health of their employees? What’re the benefits to them? How can investing in health as an asset avoid costly remedial healthcare?
* How does investing in employees’ health lead to happier, more engaged, more productive employees?
* Why work with Virgin Pulse and speak at their Thrive Summit?
More About Esther and Way to Wellville
Founded by angel investor Esther Dyson and led by health-impact innovator Rick Brush, Wellville supports its communities the way a business accelerator helps startups. Each Wellville community receives a dedicated advisor to help them develop strong leadership teams and implement approaches that are responsive to changing conditions. Most important, we help Wellville communities demonstrate value to attract the kind of collaboration and investment needed to scale, spread and sustain impact over time.
W2W is working with five Wellville communities to accelerate their own efforts to produce health. The communities are: Clatsop County, OR; Lake County, CA; Muskegon County, MI; COMING SOON; and Spartanburg, SC. Dyson is the W2W advocate for Muskegon, and is actively involved in overall policy and fundraising for the project.
The organization generates real-world evidence by supporting multi-sector teams in five U.S. communities over 10 years, and then share what we learn to inspire other communities and promote national change.
Five years in, Way to Wellville plans to operate for 10 years, measuring its progress year by year and at the end, using both specific program-based metrics and the overall goals set by the 100 Million Healthier Lives Initiative. Its mission is to help five small communities get healthy while developing business models for doing so at scale and to inspire other communities and perhaps government entities to copy its approach of long-term investment. Its motto is “Don’t rent your health. Invest in it!”
The basic idea is to favor implementation over innovation: to apply approaches known to work, at scale in small communities where scale is relatively easy to achieve in terms both of resources and political buy-in. Each community sets its own priorities and goals around issues such as obesity/diabetes, mental health, dental health, smoking, substance abuse, high care utilization and overall human capacity and health disparities; W2W assists in finding partners and funders and in managing accountability.
Esther spends her non-Way to Wellville time investing in and nurturing start-ups, with a recent focus on health and aerospace. On the health side, she is an investor in 23andMe (also a director), Applied Proteomics, Clover Health, Cur, Eligible API, GeriJoy, Health Loop, HealthTap, i2Dx, Impact Health, Medivo, Omada Health, and Zipongo and many more!