Adventist Health has acquired Blue Zones, a community-based population health management company that employs a systemic and environmental approach to improving the health of entire cities and communities.
The organization’s work in more than 50 communities across America has been credited with double-digit drops in obesity, smoking and Body Mass Index, achieving millions of dollars of savings in healthcare costs. With the new coronavirus pandemic, the deal highlights the attention now focused on health care (or lack of it) in whole communities.
The target, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, infuses healthy choices, enhances connections, instills purpose and fuels hope to impact communities where people live, work and play. This includes leveraging the Blue Zones Power9® lessons of longevity through a comprehensive model for transformational change called the Life Radius®, a focus on people, places and policy. Rather than relying solely on individual behavior change, Blue Zones focuses on optimizing environments to improve health by design.
Roseville, California-based Adventist Health shares a Seventh-Day Adventist mission with its communities across the country, including Loma Linda. Its vision is to improve individual wellbeing by investing in healthier communities. It provides care in hospitals, clinics, home care agencies, hospice agencies and joint-venture retirement centers in rural and urban communities.
Loma Linda happens to be one of the communities that Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner identified as one of the world’s five blue zones longevity hot spots in a 2005 cover story in National Geographic. The average life expectancy in America is 78, but in Loma Linda, the average male lives to 89 and the average female to 91.
This deal follows a major merger between Adventist and St. Joseph Health that was called off last November.
