Open Source Wellness is a “Behavioral Pharmacy,” an innovation bridging the gaps between healthcare and community. OSW is founded on the understanding that just as we need CVS to fill our prescription medications, we need an affordable, accessible, and effective delivery system for health behavior change – eating better, exercising, reducing our stress, and connecting meaningfully with others. With 86% of our national healthcare budget spent on chronic disease, it’s time for a low-cost, proven, experiential, and culturally-adaptable method for preventing and reversing chronic disease.
Our clinical healthcare-based model, developed in partnership with Alameda Health System (Hayward Wellness Center), has emerged as a spreadable/scalable intervention, and has generated substantial interest in the last year. In brief, Open Source Wellness delivers its signature trans diagnostic, experiential program in full workflow integration and electronic-medical-record integration on site at the clinic. Importantly, and key to our success in spreading this model, we have created a financially sustainable model via group medical visits (an MD or NP participates in the group, and then bills insurance for each patient).
The partnership inherent in this model builds in a robust level of clinical-community integration: services are co-designed, dually delivered, and fully integrated into the clinical workflow (via screening, referral, and booking). Of particular importance, due to the emphasis on peer and lay leadership, as well as behavioral treatment and prevention instead of medical intervention, this kind of partnership is profoundly affordable and scalable across the healthcare safety net. With content similar to Dean Ornish’s highly effective Lifestyle Medicine program (recently funded by CMS) but at less than 1⁄4 the cost, the OSW Behavioral Pharmacy model has the potential and the vision to be the democratization of health behavior change.
