Avante Personal Training Programs
Healthcare focuses on diagnoses, procedures, and prescriptions. Health outcomes are eighty percent determined by personal action. Personal training is needed to develop health self-management capabilities that prevent problems and promote recovery from illness or injury. Healthcare is a professional process. Health challenges are personal. Solutions must be patient centered, accessible, and convenient.
An INSEAD Health Technology Conference in June 2000 concluded:
Current health care systems are professionally driven and reactive, problem oriented and concerned with treating disease. This is a broadly interventionist approach to isolated events. An alternative approach argues in favor of seeking, and maintaining wellbeing, health being self-defined and self-driven rather than defined by professionals or government. Inevitably, the solution will lie somewhere between two such approaches.
The consequences of low health self-management capabilities are excessive healthcare costs, insufficient personal health engagement, poor healthcare outcomes, and decreased economic productivity.
What Avante Does
Clinical studies by Kaiser Permanente proved that group-based training programs are effective in lowering healthcare costs. US Government Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) studies at Stanford in 2002 established that health self-management training lowers chronic disease management costs.
Avante produces unique “learning by doing” training that builds health self-management capabilities. Based on successful European programs, the Avante training system actively engages participants in group processes that “entrain experience” in new behavioral patterns.
For many years American healthcare providers have relied on giving patients strong or frightening reasons to change health behavior. Healthcare professionals admonish patients to do better and flood them with printed educational material in vain efforts to train them conceptually. Patients do not convert these concepts into sustained actions.
“Learning by doing” systems engage participants in physical practice that leads to new routines. After intensive entrainment over several weeks, interval reinforcement sessions extend the routines and may make them virtually permanent.
The Avante Process
Avante trains twelve to twenty people at a time in activity-based programs based on proprietary “learning by doing” techniques that engage participants in processes that originated in human tribal experience but have only recently been employed in the important work of changing health and work performance behavior. People learn new behaviors physically, somewhat like soldiers first learn military routines by marching. As new routines are entrained, they lead to reliable self-regulation practices.
Avante learning by doing systems are based on a broad range of scientific knowledge and clinical experience. They produce group physical learning engagement that may prove to be more effective the more traditional group learning success reported by Permanente and AHRQ research.
Program Content
Health, performance, and productivity gains are based on acquiring physical, resource acquisition, and relationship capabilities developed through participation in Avante programs. Avante programs teach skills that lead to better physical strength, nutrition, resource management, stress adaptation, and ability to navigate the healthcare system. As these skills are physically acquired, they are strongly reinforced by the group learning process.
Training starts with an open session focused on identifying ideas and attitudes participants have about health maintenance and their experiences within the health care system. People quickly engage or connect with these topics and with one another in these sessions.
In early human history when the neural system developed its remarkable social capabilities, there was little language. Humans learned through behavioral communication such as posturing, facial expression, limb movement, and intonation. These gestures and sounds became organized into the body language people still use today. Spoken or written language enhances, but does not replace this communication. Publications and conferences will probably never replace shared physical experience.
Business Perspective
Companies, government organizations, and communities need to augment healthcare by adding personal health management training, a relatively low cost solution to improving healthcare outcomes.
The healthcare perspective is limited by focusing too much on professional people doing procedures and sending patients home with prescriptions. The extra perspective that can improve healthcare outcomes is engaging people in health-building actions.
Avante focuses on what people can learn to do for themselves and the measurable health and business productivity gains that can result.
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