Every day more people become attuned to caring about their health, wellness and the healthcare system. They include mothers, maybe you and others, nutritionists, wellness advisors and most providers whom anyone would, if asked, call caring. As obvious "healthcarers" they share a characteristic that isn't elusive, just underappreciated and inconclusive, until now… caring more than the norm, much more.

Put more causal meaning into language. "Sparingly sprinkle" these into writings, thoughts and creative media to help bring health and wellbeing to life—including yours.

---

While nothing separates caring from health and healthcare, America's everyday routines and common patterns of behavior have diluted its influence. That needs to change. Our response, healthcaring, meshes with a desirable goal—wellbeing—to reset behavior and lessen competing interests. When people purposely care for something, they want to tend to it and improve it, which also explains "the why" for this reemphasis on caring health and healthcare.

HealthCARING translates what we've long known about illness prevention and healthcare delivery into the power of routine action. Reset health mindsets and attitudes while tapping into positive human nature. Untangle all-too-often cryptic healthcare and mental health decisions. Redirect physicians, patients, providers, payers, prevention partners, pharmaceuticals, policy planners, plaintiffs, politicians and the public toward an all-embracing destination.

HealthCARING: A Reset for Health and Healthcare describes the process. Read the book and...

As we better understand how to use behavioral definitions, it becomes easier to cue positive change in ourselves and others. The challenge is to choose them wisely and that is where Open4Definition's research provides the blueprint. HealthCARING is a co-created initiative to do this with forethought across the Health and Healthcare sector.

Use these causal words. Buy a book if it helps. Shine a spotlight on healthcaring!

HealthCARING: A Reset for Health and Healthcare

What is Healthcaring?

As a behavioral definition, healthcaring taps into a positive disposition of people at both a conscious and subconscious level. It's defined as many, together in caring health and healthcare. Six attributes of healthcaring follow: the first three emphasize the individual and the last three center on its societal impact. Read more...

---

The Context

Our approach is a deliberate mimic of how one person changed the way an entire society behaves. Jay Winsten, a Harvard Public Health professor, introduced the idea of a designated driver to America in the 1980's.

"Winsten's inspiration was that you could make the behavior contagious by repeatedly exposing people to it, in many different contexts, even if those contexts were fictional." He collaborated with writers and producers of more than 160 prime-time television programs before the internet and cable splintered America's attention.

"Winsten always requested just 'five seconds' of dialogue featuring the designated-driver idea, not a whole episode or even a whole scene." Shows would sprinkle designated-driver moments into their scripts. These moments appeared on Cheers, The Cosby Show, Who's the Boss, Hunter and many others. In an especially memorable episode of another big hit show, L.A. Law, actor Harry Hamlin, playing the heart-throb lawyer, asked the bartender to please call his designated driver.

Three years after the campaign launched, nine out of ten people were familiar with designated driver. And in 1991, people were behaving differently. Fifty-four percent of those who drank frequently had also been driven home by a designated driver.

This causal mechanism was not just life changing—it created "life saving" behavior. By 1992, alcohol-linked road fatalities had declined by at least twenty-five percent since 1988, occurring at a time when more vehicles were on the highways and more miles were driven. It is likely the number of lives saved by the wide use of designated drivers was understated. By now, the cumulative total far exceeds 100,000 deaths avoided on America's roads.

Jay Winsten used the power and reach of television to stimulate a desired behavior and Americans responded. They first saw it and then mimicked it. Designated driver became a societal norm. What began as pure fiction became tangible, quantifiable and highly instructive.

---

Five Healthcare Myths

MYTH 1 The United States has the finest healthcare in the world.

MYTH 2 More healthcare is better healthcare.

MYTH 3 Cost controls stifle innovation or lead to rationed care.

MYTH 4 Access to medical service is the most important factor in determining how healthy anyone is.

MYTH 5 Health insurance has to be cruel.

---