Summary: Recently long-time integrative health author, system-consultant and pioneer Roger Jahnke, OMD urged me to "resurrect" a document from the early years of integrative health called the Design Principles for Healthcare Renewal. It wasn't until I decided to re-publish them here that I realized this is almost exactly a decade since these were well-received in October 2001 as a clarifying document by the members of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Jahnke's request resonated with a presentation at Bravewell Integrative Medicine in Action event November 10, 2011 in which it was suggested that we might yet see an economic incentive structure to support a "thriving industry of health creation" (Principle #9). Here are those 10 principles, borne out of a Task Force on Principles from the 2000 Integrative Medicine Industry Leadership Summit. Do they have useful resonance for you?

I received a recent query from long-time integrative health leader Roger Jahnke, OMD. Ten years ago he and I had been part of a Task Force from the 2000 Integrative Medicine Industry Leadership Summit that developed something that became known as the Design Principles for Healthcare Renewal. Wrote Jahnke: "I remain inspired by the 'principles.'" He asked when I thought they might be "resurrected." 

The Design Principles were well-received by the White House Commission

Jahnke's note roughly

• Len Wisneski, MD, now chair of the Integrated Heathcare Policy Consortium
• Pamela Snider, ND, executive editor and founder of the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Project
• Writer and integrative health consultant Alan Dumoff, MSW, JD
• Terry Schmidt, PhD currently a faculty member at UC Irvine
• Jery Whitworth, RN, CCP, then a partner with Mehmet Oz, MD in the integrative services department at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital; and 
• Beth Clay, then House Government Reform Committee staff member and now a DC lobbyist.

The Design Principles of Health Care

for Accelerating Personal and Health System Renewal

  Task Force from the Integrative Medicine Industry Leadership Summit 2000
Spring 2001

Preamble
Core principles drive the way healthcare operates and is experienced. Times of change and disturbance call us to examine, clarify and commit to renew our individual and community practices. The following set of principles emphasizes the integrative nature of optimal healthcare. Such care seeks to create health by engaging new and old approaches to health for the individual, system, community and environment. Integrative care is grounded in relationships, seeks sustainability, is energized by the unknown and crafted through continuous exploration of strategies for uniting the best of the world's evolving practices, outcomes and traditions.

These principles, based on the missions and visions of diverse stakeholders, are an initial expression of an effort to create a unifying view of a renewed system for healthcare delivery and payment. These principles are meant not as ideals, but as working tools of design, application, evaluation and alignment.

The design principles for accelerating health and well-being in individuals, and in the health system, are:

1. Honor wholeness and interconnectedness in all actions.
Body, mind, spirit, community, and environment are an integral whole that cannot be separated into isolated parts. All are involved in healing. Healthcare interventions, regardless of their focus, affect the whole.

2. Enhance the capacity for self-repair and healing.
The innate capacity for healing and the individual's personal empowerment in supporting these natural processes are fundamental considerations in all healthcare decisions.

3. Prioritize care in accordance with a hierarchy of treatment.
Care, and the leveraging of resources to affect care, are prioritized along diagnostic and therapeutic hierarchies which begin with education and empowerment in healthy choices, then move to the least invasive approaches and escalate, as necessary, to approaches linked to increased likelihood of adverse effects or higher costs. The starting point for intervention is established through clarifying, with the individual receiving care, the risks associated with foregoing, and with undertaking, more invasive approaches. Chronology and cause are fundamental aspects of this healing order.

4. Improve care through continuously expanding the evidence base.
Healthcare is a combined art and science in which personal practices and clinical choices and services are continuously evaluated and improved, by practitioners, users and organizations, based on diverse evidence. Included are the desires, perceptions and outcomes experienced by the individuals at the center of care, the clinical experience and understandings of all members of a provider team, and particularly, systematically gathered evidence of experience and outcomes. More stringent evidentiary standards are associated with higher risk or more costly interventions.

5. Embrace the fullness of diverse health care systems.
Conventional, traditional, indigenous, complementary and alternative models of care, and their bodies of knowledge, have contributions to make to the healthcare which is culturally most appropriate and effective for individuals and communities. Best practices are discovered through exploring diverse structures for integration, including parallel, collaborative and assimilative models.

6. Partner with patients, their families and other practitioners.
Caregivers profoundly enhance healing and strengthen shared accountability through supporting the informed decision-making of the individuals/families/loved ones they serve, and through inclusive, respectful partnerships with other practitioners with whom they collaborate in care provision.

7. Use illness and symptoms as opportunities for learning and growth.
Illness represents an opportunity in which healing and balance are always possible even when curing is not. Symptoms are guides to health.

8. Explore integration in one's own care.
Practitioners, administrators and individuals are most effective in understanding and delivering integrative healthcare, and in embracing these design principles, when they follow these principles in their own care choices.

9. Align resource investment with these healthcare principles.
The renewal of our healthcare payment and delivery systems is fostered by aligning resource investment, in the personal, public, philanthropic and private sectors, with these principles. Humble willingness to work to resolve the tensions between one's personal and professional interests, and those shared interests expressed in these principles, is required of all participants. The renewed healthcare system is a partnership between an expanded commitment to the public health and a thriving industry of health creation.

10. Respect the time required for personal and health system change.
Interventions may be swift, but healing, habit change, and transformation take time and ongoing commitment.