Medical Fitness Programs Are a Rising Priority for Most Health Systems

NexCore attended the 21^st Medical Fitness Association (MFA) annual conference in New Orleans last week. We value our membership in the MFA, which is the organization of medical fitness centers that differentiates from health clubs by offering a medically prescribed and supervised program of preventative fitness. 
 
At this year’s conference, there was lots of buzz about the integration of fitness into the delivery of healthcare, where physicians and outpatient services are co-located in a facility with medical fitness. Integration can mean many things, but the goal is to have physicians involved in programs such as “Exercise is Medicine” where they “prescribe” visits to the fitness center and follow their patients’ progress.  Integration can also mean the implementation of medical fitness into the patient-centered medical home model of care, the use of telemedicine, and the shared use of electronic medical records. To us, integration also means designing facilities that create functional adjacencies between providers and medical fitness—for example, an orthopedic surgeon who performed an ACL repair spontaneously “sees” the patient while they are in physical therapy and in the gym after therapy.  Or, the flow of patients in and out of medical fitness routes patients near the entries to physicians so their practices receive a marketing benefit from the patient traffic.
 
Another popular topic at the conference was the movement to population management and how medical fitness will play an important part. Several presenters discussed measuring the value of medical fitness programs by showing readmission rates of members vs. non-members, number of referrals from membership to inpatient and outpatient services, and employee health outcomes—hospitals with large numbers of self-insured employees are providing credits on healthcare insurance premiums for employees who use the fitness center and agree to health assessments and biometric screening, which are conducted at the fitness center. 
 
The bottom line—medical fitness is a rising priority for most health systems, which are looking at facilities that consolidate and reorganize physician care and outpatient services. We spoke with a few directors of successful integrated medical fitness centers who say they are receiving requests from other health systems for site tours, and some are conducting as many as 2 to 4 tours per week. Healthcare reform is undoubtedly moving forward, and we’re excited about being involved in the business of creating facilities that help improve community health. Blog posts RSS