Family Health
Ten Things You Need To Know About Self-Care
By
Aug 31, 2008 - 4:35:55 PM

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - There is growing awareness of the staggering impact of chronic disease at a global and national level. In the U.S. the pain is felt at every level, from
macroeconomic to the individual household. Over 80 percent of the $2.3 trillion spent annually on healthcare goes toward the treatment of chronic disease. At the employer level, the costs of lost productivity due to presenteeism (sub-par on-the-job performance due to ill-health) and absenteeism exceed direct healthcare expenses by a factor of 3x.

Individuals and their families suffer significant economic impact (50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses) not to mention decreased quality of life. A Gallup survey found that less than 50 percent of Americans considered themselves to be "thriving," primarily due to health and money worries.

In the last few years, there have been significant efforts to drive "responsibility" for health to individuals, motivating individuals to participate more fully in preventive care efforts and making them into more prudent purchasers of healthcare. There has also been significant growth in CDHPs (consumer driven health plans).

However, we believe that efforts to push more responsibility on individuals who are today ill-equipped to help themselves will not get us very far.

Medication adherence rates hover around 50 percent . It is clear that we need to understand the challenges that are preventing people from being effective and then use this information to provide tools and solutions that can actually help people do better.

Given convenient and effective tools to help them along, individuals can and will significantly, positively impact their own wellness through improved self-care. I want to share a few observations based on the initial results of consumer pilot studies we have conducted around a new self-care system.
Here are ten things that you may not have considered before about self-care:

1. Chronic disease is by definition a long-term condition, and the activities to manage chronic conditions occur primarily outside doctors' offices, clinics and hospitals -- they occur in the sphere of daily life with the individual as the primary caregiver. We have more control over our daily actions than anyone else.
2. We rely on a small group of individuals who we have frequent interaction with to help us. We look to this network including family and friends, even yoga instructors, coaches, etc. for assistance in health matters.
3. Our interactions with healthcare providers are typically short and much of that time is spent recalling events that occured during the intervening months between visits, leaving precious little time for meaningful discussion.
4. Wellness extends beyond just the physiological - it requires that the needs of the whole person be addressed, giving a 360 degree view of individuals as people rather than just as patients.
5. Even individuals who are highly educated and motivated still express significant challenges in carrying out their daily health tasks and integrating deceptively easy activities like taking medications on schedule, eating healthy or adding exercising into their routine.
6. For many individuals, their daily regimen may also include vitamins, supplements, dietary changes, alternative medicine, etc. that they fervently believe will help them feel better.
7. Current health and wellness solutions typically address just one small part of the equation or may be focused on a single disease or condition. From the individual's perspective, however, the solution needs to help them with all of their conditions (not just their diabetes, for example) and their regimen must be inclusive of any alternative therapies,
etc. they may chose to add on their own.
8. Many of today's solutions are home-based solutions, but we lead active mobile lives and need the solutions to be with us wherever we go to be effective.
9. Individuals do not respond well to solutions that have a "big brother" feel and include terminology like "monitoring" or "compliance," and there is no doubt that this has an influence on the low adoption rates in the healthcare industry.
10. A majority of solutions are focused on the most common conditions, but over 25 million people in the U.S suffer from a rare condition and have significant unmet needs.

I hope that these observations on self-care fuel discussion, debate and bold action. I welcome you to join the effort to understand what it takes to empower individuals and unlock the potential of self-care as the most effective means to address the enormous public and personal costs of chronic
disease.

Zume Life is making self-care a reality for the 50 percent of Americans struggling to effectively and consistently manage chronic conditions that limit them from realizing their full potential in their personal and professional life. For more information, please visit www.zumelife.com

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