Abstract:

Introduction:
Promoting health and wellness with open badges is a quickly emerging area in the field of public health. However, the majority of programs rolled out to date have been focused on addressing the ecosystems of those individuals already suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity and not on the preventative measures needed to reduce the risk of these life-threatening conditions. By introducing an open badges strategy for health beginning as early as kindergarten, individuals can grow into proactive well-informed agents in charting their own personalized journey into healthy diet and lifestyle decisions and behaviors.

Background:
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the top life threatening diseases of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes have been proven to be preventable through lifestyle modification. A hundred years ago these conditions were barely on the radar as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever were the most dangerous illnesses of the day.
As detailed by Stephen C. Schimpff MD in The Future of Health Care Delivery, industry has found that 70% of health care costs to the employer is due to modifiable behaviors and at least two thirds of these expenditures is applied to managing just four diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. What is evident is that the causes of death have switched from acute illnesses to chronic illnesses. And we know from insurance companies that chronic illnesses consume about 70-85% of claims paid.

Methods:
Placing the emphasis on prevention, we can minimize the impact of these diseases for the current and future generations by employing a comprehensive open badges strategy. Age appropriate material pertaining to each key diet and lifestyle category are taught and badges are earned when concepts and skills are demonstrated against a well-vetted set of procedural and behavioral competencies. The health promotion badge strategy covers the top ten life threatening diseases along with a broad category of life skill badges addressing such areas as cooking and food preparation, identity, survival, respect, and personal belief systems.

Conclusions and Extensions:
As an extension to this current open badging strategy, gamification and social media are in the process of being incorporated to retain and extend participants’ engagement and motivation. Participants earn points through gaming and convert those points into prizes and other incentives along the way. One of the goals of this extension of the model is to elicit potential sponsorship from industry such as insurance providers who stand to profit immensely over the long term and could afford to incentify health. Other potential industry collaborators include game manufacturers, technology providers, and smart phone companies that are all seeing a booming marketplace for health-related technology through their products and through the emerging area of wearable computing.

Keywords:

Health promotion, preventative health, open badges, gamification.