| Abstrakt: |
Prologue:Life-styles and their link to disease have been part of the body of human knowledge since the time of ancient Greece. Hippocrates, the father of the medical profession, offered persuasive arguments linking disease with environmental factors, nutrition, and modes of life in his treatise “Airs, Waters, and Places,” written more than 2,300 years ago. Until recently, though, Americans have by and large failed to act on a compelling accumulation of knowledge linking individual life-style with individual health status. Now, concern with health promotion is growing, as individuals recognize the dangers of eating wrong, smoking, drinking to excess, and failing to exercise regularly. In this essay, Susan Wilner, who holds a doctorate of science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that health maintenance organizations (HMOs) have a golden opportunity to capitalize on the growing interest in health promotion and disease prevention by developing new strategies and by being entrepreneurial in their approach. HMOs, as the name implies, long have enjoyed a reputation for conducting innovative programs for health maintenance, but all too often, as Wilner describes, the programs are quite traditional. With an enrolled population and special incentives of the HMO system to work with, the author argues that HMOs that invest in the development of innovative health promotion strategies could be a natural laboratory for determining which approaches work best. Wilner won a prestigious Pew Health Policy Fellowship in 1983 and devoted the next two years to studying public policy issues that surround health promotion and disease prevention. She did her work at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. Wilner is currently a lecturer on the faculty there and special assistant to the executive director of the United Way of San Francisco. |
