The Whole Health Initiative & the Triple Aim of Healthcare
How Nervous System-Focused Yoga Aligns with Whole Health Initiative & The Triple Aim of Healthcare
“Whole Health is VA’s approach to care that supports your health and well- being. Whole Health centers around what matters to you, not what is the matter with you. This means your health team will get to know you as a person, before working with you to develop a personalized health plan based on your values, needs, and goals.”
— Achieving Whole Health, A New Report for Veterans and the Nation - 2023
The National Academies recommends scaling Whole Health throughout the VA and also throughout the whole country. The report mentions yoga 20 times.
An Introduction to Yoga for Whole Health
One of the main goals of yoga is to help people find a more balanced and peaceful state of mind and body. Yoga provides many physical health benefits as well.
The Triple Aim of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) seeks to improve healthcare in the United States by focusing on three key goals: enhancing the patient experience, improving population health, and reducing healthcare costs. While yoga is not a replacement for medical care, it can contribute to these goals in the following ways:
Improving the Patient Experience:
When the whole patient is treated the experience of care improves.
Healthcare is evolving from volume to value.
Yoga is a simple and effective way for healthcare institutions to offer better value-based care.
Yoga is empowering patient-centered rahter than disease centered.
Yoga help patients become active participants rather than passive recipients of treatment.
Yoga provides valuable tools to help patients manage and improve their conditions. It encourages self-care, mindfulness, and self-awareness, allowing patients to make informed choices about their health.
The bottom line improves when patients have a better experience of care.
Improving Population Health: Population rather than individual health focus
Yoga can be adapted to a range of populations.
Yoga can be provided in groups.
Yoga is accessible and low-risk, and has a broad and expanding research base.
Yoga can be readily integrated into any program with patient-centered training for specific disciplines.
A “Public-Health Yoga” model could provide a complementary, safer, more culturally accessible and scalable option.
Reducing Healthcare Costs:
U.S. healthcare is expensive. Expense can be attributed to:
The high cost of administration: one-quarter of all costs
The high cost of medications, durable medical equipment and salaries.
The increased number of interventions
Yoga does not require expensive equipment or incur expensive staff or administrative costs.
Group delivery = low direct costs
From a preventive perspective (lifestyle medicine) costs are almost negligible: Yoga, as a form of lifestyle medicine, focuses on prevention.
Source: Subtle® Yoga
“Immediate and significant health benefits and savings could be realized throughout our healthcare system by utilizing three integrative strategies”
integrative lifestyle change programs for those with chronic disease
integrative interventions for people experiencing depression, and
integrative preventative strategies to support wellness in all populations.”
Source: Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine via Subtle® Yoga
"People want a cure for the health care system, and yoga is an important possible cure. The American lifestyle generates an enormous number of sick people, and there's a huge cost to repair them.
We're constantly looking for high-tech solutions—a new magic pill, a new surgical procedure. But what if we went low tech instead, giving people yoga strategies? It would be the biggest bang for the buck in terms of making an impact on the world.“
