We spend a lot of time, energy and effort in medicine treating advanced chronic diseases rather than preventing illness from developing or progressing in the first place.
While an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a pound of prevention is worth a ton of cure.
The main determinant of health outcomes and cost are not related to what we do in hospitals or clinics, but rather the lifestyle choices patients make in their daily lives and the socioeconomic barriers to health they often have to overcome.
What is The Million Step Challenge?
The Million Step Challenge is a fun community-based challenge WakeMed developed with local safety net clinics, Advance Community Health and Alliance Health Ministry, with the assistance of NC State Park Scholar Students.
It is aimed at developing healthy lifestyle habits in local, uninsured women through a walking challenge that incorporates both competition and group goals.
People who are active live healthier and live happier.
Encouraging Participation from Patients
Interested female patients from each clinic were invited to participate, provided with FitBit Zips and organized into physician/staff led teams (4 teams of approximately 10 patients). Each week, they have challenges to see which team can walk more steps.
Over 112 days, the goal of each individual participant is to walk 1 million steps.
The competition started in late February 2017, and more than half of participants are tracking toward their goal.
Alliance Health Ministry and Advance have done an amazing job motivating and inspiring their participating patients.
Building a Healthier Community Together
We will be tracking outcomes with weight, A1c, depression screenings and self -perception of health scores to assess the impact of increased activity on health and self-perception of health.
Adding to the competition, the fun, and the community support – we also feature weekly community guest challengers.
Some of these guests include:
- Local mayors
- City councils
- County commissioners
- Senator Tillis and his staff
- YMCA
- And our very own WakeMed administration*
*This turned into a very heated internal competition between the 20 participating WakeMed administrative leaders, and to nobody’s surprise, our CEO ended up winning.
All of this is part of WakeMed’s continued effort to meet its mission of building a stronger, healthier community by empowering patients to take control and improve their health.
About Brian Klausner, MD
Dr. Brian Klausner is a full-time physician, board certified in Internal Medicine and serves as the Medical Director for the Wake Key Community Care ACO and WakeMed Community Population Health team. Schedule an appointment with Dr. Klausner.
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