Promoting Healthier Living

LiveWELL, Carolinas!!

The healthcare continuum begins with applied medicine, the organic combination of talent, intuition and innovation that brings relief to the all too common human condition—illness and disease.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the outcome. For every diagnosis and every treatment, there is a bottom line where the procedure is measured against the cost of care. And in this arena of statistics and probabilities, of efficacy and efficiency, a vision called LiveWELL, Carolinas! materialized. What Michael C. Tarwater, CEO of Carolinas HealthCare System, and the leadership of CHS saw in those numbers was an opportunity to improve lives and help control costs simultaneously.

Revolutionary thinking for a system that treats more than nine million patients each year; LiveWELL, Carolinas! actually addresses costs by aspiring to intervene on behalf of the public it treats, to help them avoid future medical conditions. Through analysis of the rising costs of treating the public, CHS leadership came to the inescapable conclusion that, in one sense, the real mission of the nation’s third largest public healthcare system should be to see fewer patients, not more. LiveWELL, Carolinas! gave the institution an avenue to more narrowly focus the system’s expertise around wellness and preventative medicine, as a way to impact illness and disease through lifestyle and behavior changes…by “living well.”

While illness, disease, injury and other aspects of traditional medicine will always be the mainstay of CHS, LiveWELL, Carolinas! strived to create a model of proactive choices, along with a complete environmental approach to wellness that began on campus. Diseases including diabetes, cardiac disease and other debilitating and chronic conditions often have their beginnings in lifestyle behaviors including a lack of exercise, poor nutritional habits, stress, smoking and other unhealthy behaviors.

By addressing disease and illness at the prevention end of the health spectrum, CHS hopes to help people “choose” to avoid becoming patients altogether, or change unhealthy habits at a point in their condition before it requires more invasive medicine and treatment.

Launched with a public awareness campaign and jump-started with proactive leadership from the CEO on down, LiveWELL, Carolinas! represented nothing less than a complete change in nature of CHS’ mission to serve the public and its community health interests. LiveWELL, Carolinas!’ outreach elements reach the public through its acronym WELL—Work, Eat, Learn, Live. Programming and partnerships target the workplace, marketplace, schools and lifestyles. A series of television, radio, print and billboard messages extolled the virtues of healthy choices, while suggesting proactive approaches to wellness, and CEO Michael Tarwater publicly announced LiveWELL, Carolinas! in a series of high-profile appearances, calling it “a permanent change in the nature of our mission and our commitment to the public’s well-being.”

LiveWELL, Carolinas! on the CMC campus began with the LiveWELL Warriors, a program of diet, exercise, education and behavior modification offered to employees that resulted in dramatic improvement in health for many CHS staff members, including weight loss, BMI improvement, and in some cases even reducing or stopping medication use altogether. Environmental changes were both procedural and practical—the campus became tobacco-free and the campus cafeteria improved “healthy choices,” while selected stairwells underwent “makeovers”, including art, paired with posters and signs cajoling the viewer to “choose the stairs: as a health choice.

Outreach efforts include a “Work Well” partnership with Parkdale Mills, designed a program similar to LiveWell Warriors for the workforce; the Fit Squad Charlotte school partnership with the Carolina Panthers; Eat Well’s partnership with Johnson & Wales University and local fine dining restaurants and the LiveWell Warriors employee fitness program.