Introducing the Healthy Project

From Dr. Jack Groppel, Ph.D., co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, and Vice President of Applied Science and Performance Training at Wellness & Prevention, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company.

Today I joined a number of my colleagues at Johnson & Johnson and some of our partner organizations in New York City to introduce The Healthy Project.  What’s The Healthy Project?  It’s a movement to demonstrate how anyone, anywhere can make a change for themselves, their neighbors, their family or their community to become and stay healthy.

The world has become increasingly unhealthy.  Sedentary lifestyles, poor nutrition and stress are all contributing factors to this change, and it’s compounded by anxiety and limited access to basic health information, so that the solutions frequently overwhelm rather than inspire.  The result is that people have stopped listening and taking action to improve their health.  The Healthy Project is a way to help change that.

One of those changes will be accomplished by activating healthy communities – through programs like the Johnson & Johnson Gateway to a Healthy Community ™ – Healthier Kids program, a community partnership to get children moving to help combat the epidemic of childhood obesity in our cities.  The second way is by activating healthy personal empowerment through digital platforms that provide health information and remind people about doctor visits, taking medication and more.  And the third way is to activate behavior change and healthy approaches to wellness and human performance through personalized digital health coaching, energy management training,  and other innovative programs.

But that’s not all.  Today’s pressing issues of national and global health are in desperate need of being addressed with more significant measures than ever before.  At Johnson & Johnson, we believe it will take true partnership across corporate, medical, academic, government, and community entities to create a sustainable model for addressing these issues.  As a result, Wellness and Prevention Inc., the Johnson & Johnson company that I’m part of, announced a collaboration with the Lake Nona Institute to develop a longitudinal community health study.  We’re working to develop a modern day “Framingham Heart Study” – a long term, comprehensive research project that focuses on community health, human performance, and quality of life.  Just as millions of lives were saved as a result of heart disease science learned from the Framingham Heart Study, we hope that the Lake Nona Life Study will have similar far-reaching effects in the area of health, wellness and human performance.  The Lake Nona Life Study will use state-of-the-art technology and take place in a new master planned community, Lake Nona, which is expected to have a population size of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Each of the hospital and research institutional partners in the community will also participate in the project.

The study will take the form of a registry that follows participants annually with the goal of lasting for decades and generations.  Participants will sign up and submit information online through the Wellness & Prevention health risk assessment..  The kinds of information they submit – health data, biometric assessments, human performance metrics and quality of life indicators – will provide the opportunity for research that can have a significant future impact on improving health.  GE is the study’s founding partner for sustainability, Promethean for education, and Wellness & Prevention Inc. is the founding partner for health and wellness.

In sum, the goal of the Lake Nona project is to lead and be part of the movement that changes the way individuals engage with their health and the way care is delivered. The potential benefits of this project are enormous and far-reaching:  it has the potential to provide the single most valuable source of data to inform the future direction of health care, and influence the ways in which future products and services are designed and developed to meet the unique needs of individuals.   And that will allow people to take “healthy” to a whole new level.