Personalizing Health and the Well-Being

An Innovative Approach to Personalizing Health and Well-Being at the Medical Partnership

By Tai Sherman

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the extent to which primary care physicians are struggling with stress, burnout, and suicidality while attending to an unsustainable chronic disease burden in their patients. To address this, the AU/ UGA Medical Partnership established the Office of Personalized Health and Well-Being, a first of its kind national academic medicine training collaboration that creates training in lifestyle solutions to improve the wellness of physicians and their patients.

This innovative, para-curricular program delivers cutting-edge instruction in physician well-being and personalized health solutions to assist in the management of chronic diseases. The training is for medical students, resident physicians, and their patients.

The office, led by Dr. Cathy Snapp, is supported through a partnership with MBN Systems and Pure and has been awarded federal, state, and corporate grants to develop well-being models and beta test them within various academic medicine centers. Dr. Snapp established a collaboration between the Medical Partnership and the University of Florida’s College of Medicine to develop the necessary curricular offerings for medical learners, Medical Partnership faculty, and their patients. So far, training programs have been developed on: ʝ Personalized, root-cause analysis of disease ʝ Systems biology whole-person focused models of assessment and intervention ʝ Nutritional medicine ʝ Genomics and epigenetics, and ʝ Contemporary, sustainable behavioral change These programs bolster personal immune system health and inner resilience, which improve the health of faculty and medical learners, including medical students, residents, and fellows. They also meet the growing requirement from accreditation agencies to train medical learners in whole- person, lifestyle-focused care, while creating a supportive learning community within academic medicine.

“We are well-positioned to be successful with this initiative, because the data shows that healthier, happier, lifestyletrained physicians are the key to the health of patients in this era of escalating chronic and infectious disease. The time is now to train the next-generation physicians in whole-person lifestylefocused care. I’m so grateful to be a part of this team that has the experience, leadership, and passion to spearhead the needed transformation of medical education,” said Dr. Snapp.

A continuing medical education certificate program in the science and practice of functional well-being has been launched for faculty and will ultimately be offered for community physicians as well. You can learn more about these programs by visiting our website at: medicalpartnership.usg.edu.