A Private/Public Organization That Encourages Better Health Behavior and Informed Use of Health Care Services

The Health Project (THP) is a private-public organization formed to bring about critical attitudinal and behavioral changes in the American health care system, so that providers and consumers employ its vast resources with increasing knowledge and understanding.

Health care has become a major concern of Americans as they struggle with complex issues such as cost and availability. However, the way we use health care services and the attention we give to our personal health is pervasive. Many organizations are working hard to develop programs that encourage better health habits and improved understanding of how to use health services more efficiently.

The mission of The Health Project (THP) is to seek out, evaluate, promote and distribute programs with demonstrated effectiveness in influencing personal health habits and the cost effective use of health care services. These programs have the objectives of (1) providing appropriate quality care, and (2) sharply reducing the alarming rate of health care inflation, by holding down unnecessary expenditures.

The project is a dedicated undertaking, capitalizing on carefully selected private and public health initiatives which have improved measurably the health status of Americans. It will store those proven programs in a repository so that corporations and community agencies may draw on them according to their needs, constantly improving and enlarging them through a widening user network centered in THP in order to improve health care outcomes throughout the country.

THP will focus on improved personal health care practices, as well as the efficient, effective and economical use of the system when it becomes necessary. Thus,

• consumers have a responsibility not to neglect or abuse their bodies and expect others to pay the costs, and that extravagant use of the system is not an inalienable right;
  

• providers must broaden their outlook by thinking as much in the broader, more positive terms of good health as they do in the specifics of curing sickness, assuming responsibility for educating their patients in good health care habits; while
  

• employers must play a leadership role in encouraging proper health care behavior and cultivating good health care purchasing practices by employees, with emphasis on good health incentives rather than scare tactics, so that those in poor health circumstances beyond their control are not discriminated against; and finally
  

• all parties to the health care process must recognize that improved personal health habits are not only desirable but also necessary in the prevention of the serious chronic illness which occur later in life; and that increasingly knowledgeable system utilization practices are essential to progressively higher health care standards.

The programs that make up the overall THP effort are not meant by any definition to distract from consideration by other groups of such hard issues as access to health care coverage, managed care, medical tort reform and insurance industry policies and practices. Instead, they will be positive, productive, well publicized action programs for optimum use of the nation's precious health care resources.