Cone Health Receives Lifestyle Medicine Education Grant

A visit to a Cone Health doctor may soon be more about avoiding disease than treating it.

  

Greensboro – Cone Health providers, including doctors, advanced practice providers, nurses, and others, will soon have an opportunity to update their knowledge on the links between behaviors, nutrition and chronic diseases. This continuing medical education will teach new, but tested and proven approaches to caring for patients. The Greensboro-based health network has won an educational grant to train health care professionals on “lifestyle medicine.”   

Lifestyle medicine is a relatively new concept aimed at preventing many common chronic health problems. Up to 80% of chronic disease may be avoided by eating smarter, moving more, sleeping more soundly, managing stress, developing healthy relationships and avoiding drugs and alcohol. Chronic diseases are long-term conditions such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease. They are among the costliest health problems to manage. 

Lifestyle medicine also fits in with Cone Health’s growing emphasis on health and wellness. “This represents a paradigm shift in medicine. Medical education trains providers to find and fix problems causing poor health,” says Dr. Martin Portillo, president, Cone Health Medical Group. “Most providers receive little or no training in lifestyle modification or nutrition, steps that can avoid many health problems in the first place. This program will fill those gaps and our patients will benefit.”

The Lifestyle Medicine and Food as Medicine Essentials Grant provides Cone Health Medical Group providers with $330,000 worth of education. Much of the focus will be on nutrition and lifestyle modification. “When it comes to our health, we are often our own worst enemy,” says Dr. Gebreselassie Nida, who is leading the program at Cone Health. “But no one has a more vested interest in your health than you. And this training is going to bring our providers right there with you as a true partner in your health.”

This summer, Cone Health became one of now 80+ Founding Members of the Health Systems Council of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.