IDEO Health Roundtable: Dimensions of Wellness

Wellness is a difficult word. It’s associated with longstanding practices of individual self-care, pseudoscience, and much in between. 

Yet COVID-19, mass upheaval in systemic racism, economic decline, and emotional trauma in our communities have prompted us to take another look at the term—not to define the word anew, but to explore the dimensions of wellness that deliver benefits to people, and to discuss how wellness can be better aligned with healthcare in America.

In our most recent Health Roundtable, we invited digital therapeutics leaders, wellness practitioners, and community builders to explore what wellness means. A few recurring themes emerged.

• It’s not all on you: Wellness is a blend of personal and communal responsibility. Connections, whether from loved ones and groups or services and products, shape our behaviors and daily experiences. How might we amplify human connections in ways that deliver concrete health benefits? What if we could measure wellness as a health outcome? 

• Prevention and treatment: We explored where wellness shows up in our individual and communal health experiences—whether it’s through acts of self-care or medicalized through procedures and pills. In a world where many people do not have agency, how might the healthcare system better support healthy behaviors? How might we incorporate wellness into the language of healthcare services and practices?

• Developing resilience: We concluded by asking whether resilience—the ability to cope and rebound—is something that can be designed. Or if it is something that can only be a byproduct of experiences—a muscle that’s built only when you’ve gone through something. How might we design solutions for people that build resilience and bring joy to people’s lives?

We’re actively exploring these questions through work in end-of-life-care, hospital settings, and in the course of people’s regular medical routines. Where, if anywhere, do dimensions of wellness show up for you? If you are making large-scale decisions for patients or users, where do you draw the distinction between wellness and medicine? Or, is the term wellness simply too problematic to be useful? I welcome your thoughts.