I’m normally not a huge fan of master-planned neighborhoods, preferring instead a house surrounded by lots of trees and native plants at the dead end of a dirt road. However, Orlando’s Lake Nona community is embarking on an interesting journey that got my attention. It’s transforming itself into a living laboratory for exploring health challenges and testing new initiatives that could have a measurable impact on population health and wellness for generations to come.
A collaboration between Wellness & Prevention Inc. (a Johnson & Johnson company) and the non-profit Lake Nona Institute, the Lake Nona Life Study will evaluate the health and wellness of participating residents, employers, employees and students over the course of multiple years, focusing on the link between health, wellness, longevity and quality of life. The results will create a new database of health information that will likely spur additional research projects to track and determine the factors that impact health and well-being.
“Everyone is looking for a sustainable model around wellness,” says Sanjay Gupta, president of Wellness & Prevention Inc. “The Lake Nona Life Study carves out a unique opportunity for business, academia, government and medicine to unite on this issue and collect data beyond traditional channels. It’s a rare chance to study wellness on a larger scale and care for individuals and communities at the same time.”
It will be interesting to see how this pilot program develops. It could well be a blueprint for the future of healthcare in the United States.
For more information, visit www.wellnessandpreventioninc.com.
