White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities

The White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities approves commitment from the Medical Partnership’s Office of Personalized Health and Well-being

The Augusta University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership’s Office of Personalized Health and Well-being was recognized as part of the $1.7 billion White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities.

The White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities is a nationwide call to action to make commitments to advance President Biden’s goal to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases by 2030. The initiative focuses on forging public-private partnerships dedicated to building healthier communities through best practices, training, and collaborations.

The Office of Personalized Health and Well-being, along with its collaborative partners, is making a 10-year, in-kind commitment valued at $25 million to launch a National Training and Research Collaborative through MBN Systems. This will establish an open-sourced web-based platform that provides evidence-based tools to academic medicine educators, primary care physicians, and other healthcare professionals. These tools will support the integration of lifestyle and sustainable behavior change into the current standard of care for both healthcare professionals and their patients.

Support for the platform is expected from Nestlé Health Science and its Pure Encapsulations® brand, the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB), and the State of Georgia’s Area Health Education Centers (AHEC).

The commitment of $25 million will be twofold: 1) development of lifestyle medicine evidence-based tools and training for the more common chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, etc.., into existing electronic medical records and training platforms, and 2) development of resilience training programs for healthcare providers, medical learners, community/public health networks and their patients.

An important goal of the platform will be to help communities avoid chronic diseases and develop tools and programs that are effective in restoring health to those with existing chronic disorders. Modules for the more common chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, irritable bowel syndrome, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and autoimmune disorders, will be offered.

The 10-year goal is to make these tools and training available to over 10,000 practicing healthcare professionals within the AMWA network, and over 100,000 healthcare practitioners in the AHEC, Nestle, UGA medical school/residency training networks, and White House commitment collaborators.

“It is clear that healthcare is moving more and more into personalization, prevention, and health promotion,” said Dr. Cathy Snapp, campus director of behavioral health. “To that end, we are looking forward to building collaborative teams and partners on a local, state, and national level united in a common purpose of building healthier communities.”

The Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities accepted 141 commitments, and they were announced by Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff at an event at the White House on February 27.