HealthCamp

To all our HealthCa.mp Friends and Colleagues:

This broadcast is a result of a fortuitous technical issue that occurred yesterday. No, it wasn’t Heartbleed. I was simply upgrading plugins in WordPress and hit the dreaded white screen of death. Fixing the problem required some reconfiguration and the result was that a healthca.mp broadcast was issued. Rather than leave you wondering what that was about it finally prompted me to put my fingers to the keyboard and send out an update about HealthCa.mp. So here goes…

Let me start with some background to explain the hiatus since 2012:

The past 18+ months have been a rollercoaster ride. I have been fully absorbed by a demanding project to build an ICD-10 Computer Assisted Coding platform in the cloud for a Fortune 50 company. Consequently HealthCa.mp has had to take a back seat. Towards the end of 2013 I was finally getting a few free CPU cycles to think about HealthCa.mp. I realized how much I missed the deep and meaningful conversations and connections that grew from our HealthCa.mp meetings. HealthCa.mp started out a desire to break down the silos in HealthCare and each meeting served to reinforce the belief that we are stronger together, rather than trying to act individually. HealthCare is a team sport with better outcomes when all of us are engaged in achieving the desired outcomes.

While HealthCa.mp has been on hiatus we have continued to watch our personal health, endeavoring to stay healthy through “in situ” exercise. By this I mean taking inspiration from our friend Dr Ted Eytan and participating in numerous conference calls while walking. Yes, a Wireless Headset for your office phone is one of the best investments you can make! We also have watched our diet and tried to eat healthily but still have fun and enjoy great food.

Why is this relevant?

It is time to re-invent HealthCa.mp and in doing so we want to pick up on the concept of Good Food and Healthy Eating as the cornerstone of Health. Eating Healthily, without getting hung up on always being perfect is achievable but people often need help getting started. We have come across many people that have been diagnosed with food allergies and suddenly find themselves struggling to make sense of a myriad of choices and decisions that they are not familiar with making.

So How do we re-invent HealthCa.mp?

This is where we need the help and assistance of our fellow HealthCampers. The vision for HealthCa.mp is this:

We want to promote healthy eating. To do this we want to bring together the grocery stores, nutritionists, healthcare providers and payers together with chefs and the community. If you are dealing with a health condition that requires a special diet. We want to pair people in the community up with nutritionists and chefs so that they can learn practical tactics to selecting the best foods that fit a budget and a health need. Not only helping with food selection but also how to prepare simple, healthy meals that fit a busy family lifestyle.

We would also like to bring together software and hardware companies that have hardware, software and mobile solutions that can support the health eating objective.

So how can you help?

Can you reach out to people that you know in these various organizations and engage them. This is an initiative that can be taken in to local communities where grocery stores work with healthcare providers and local employers to help employees and others in the community to help themselves to eat healthier.

This is a big objective but we know that the inventive and motivated people that have attended HealthCa.mps can make change happen and we believe that what we are proposing is something that can make a difference in the health of our communities not only in the near term but for generations to come, if we educate our kids to eat healthier.

Are you with us?