The Cleveland Clinic‘s Wellness Institute has lost one of its pioneers — Dr. Elizabeth Ricanati, an internal medicine doctor who specializes in women’s health.
Ricanati ran the Wellness Institute’s Lifestyle 180 program before she left town recently for personal reasons. The Clinic is searching for her replacement, said spokeswoman Erinne Dyer.
The program that teaches patients how to use exercise, stress management and nutrition to manage or reverse 10 chronic diseases is helping the Clinic become a leader in the wellness market, which could reach $1 trillion this year, according to one economist.
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Lifestyle 180 also is the basis for the dream of Dr. Michael Roizen, the Clinic’s chief wellness officer and leader of its Wellness Institute, to someday open one disease-reversal center for every five fast-food restaurants nationwide. Roizen, a best-selling author and wellness expert, helped start the institute in mid-2007.
If it were expanded nationwide, the program could be an answer for rising obesity and disease rates — and skyrocketing healthcare costs — in the United States.
Ricanati, who will continue to advise the Lifestyle 180 program, joined the Cleveland Clinic seven years ago after training and working at Columbia University’s Center for Women’s Health. “Two-and-a-half years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Roizen and getting wind of what he was up to,” Ricanati said during a May interview. “And I came running as fast as I could.”
She helped Roizen develop the Lifestyle 180 program, which is a year-long course taught at the former TRW headquarters in Lyndhurst, Ohio — now home for the Wellness Institute — “that incorporates nutrition, exercise and stress management in a structured curriculum over 18 sessions,” Ricanati said. “Through behavioral modification, patients are able to stabilize or reverse their chronic disease, which is pretty exciting.”
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The program is “an integrated approach to disease,” she said. “Instead of relying just on pills, surgery and technology, it’s looking at behavioral modification and lifestyle modification, and how to treat disease.”
The goal of the program is to maximize health. “We’re trying to reduce the burden of chronic disease, and we’re trying to decrease the cost of chronic disease,” Ricanati said.
The program’s results? “We see total cholesterol go down and LDL go down. And we see surrogate markers for inflammation — C reactive protein and insulin — go down. Blood pressure gets better,” she said.
Patients are feeling and sleeping better, so they’re more productive. “What we’re seeing is, patients can, in fact, do this,” she said. “They can change what they eat. And they can change if they exercise and how they exercise. And they can remember to breathe every day.”
Most insurance policies do not cover Lifestyle 180. “I hope that will change,” Ricanati said. “It’s penny-wise and pound foolish for us to be spending almost 20 percent of our GDP on healthcare and not cover things like yoga and blueberries, but cover bariatric surgery and open-heart surgery. That’s not a sustainable model. We have to do something different.”
“Mike has a unique way of engaging with people so they listen to him,” Lindseth said. “He makes a compelling argument that if you do a few things, you can have a dramatic impact on your health.”
Roizen also is talking to people who could help realize his dream of opening one disease reversal center for every five fast-food restaurants nationwide.
The centers would be based on the Wellness Institute’s Lifestyle 180 program, which runs group sessions that teach patients to manage or reverse 10 diseases – ranging from diabetes to breast cancer — with diet, exercise and stress management, as well as traditional drugs or surgeries.
That dream doesn’t end at America’s borders. Roizen has been talking to public health officials in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where the Clinic already manages one medical center and will manage Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi when it’s completed.
“So part of the joy is the same programs we can offer in Cleveland and that Clevelanders can take advantage of, we may be able to use in Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi to help citizens there,” Roizen said.
“The chance of our getting to do disease reversal for larger groups of people in the same way that we’re able to do it individually” is exciting, he said. It’s an opportunity to “make a larger impact with no larger cost to society.”
If the businesses are commercialized, that would be done by Cleveland Clinic Innovations, which licenses the Clinic’s technologies or spins out companies to take those technologies to market.
“That’s how we commercialize everything here,” Roizen said. “Whether it is intellectual property from how we manage our bed turnover or intellectual property from the software we developed in wellness for coaching.”
The Clinic has been walking the wellness talk for several years. In 2005, it banned smoking from its main campus and two years later stopped hiring smokers. In 2007, it banned trans-fats from its menus (so long, McDonald’s) and put healthy snacks in its vending machines.
The Clinic started 2008 by establishing its Wellness Institute and later began offering free yoga classes and Weight Watchers services to employees, and a weekly farmers’ market to employees and the community. Last year, it rolled out a GO Foods! label for healthy foods in its cafeterias and at local grocery stores.
The institute also is where the Clinic’s wellness businesses are based — the set of services from executive physicals to workplace exercise programs to a Web site that offers hundreds of wellness products to buy.
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