Vail Health launches Healthspan program, designed to maximize longevity and quality of life

This week, Vail Health launches its new Healthspan program, designed to take a natural, science-based approach to improving quality of life and longevity.

“Healthspan, at its core, is a lifestyle intervention program,” said Josiah Middaugh, the Healthspan program director.

The program is “really focused on pulling those big levers of exercise and nutrition to prevent chronic diseases and to make the quality of everyone’s life better,” he said.

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The Healthspan program is part of Vail Health’s approach to wholistic health care, improving health upstream by attempting to stop chronic disease before it occurs. 

“Instead of being focused on just treating disease or treating symptoms, we really want to be on the prevention end of it,” Middaugh said. 

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“Vail Health isn’t just a hospital anymore,” said Sally Welsh, Vail Health’s director of public relations. With the addition of Colorado Mountain Medical’s primary and specialty care in 2019 and the behavioral health expansion, “it has been evolving gradually and expanding, and now it is a true wellness and health-focused system.”

Chris Lindley, Vail Health’s chief population officer and executive director of behavioral health, devised the idea for Healthspan and brought Middaugh onto the team about a year ago.

An Eagle County resident of 25 years, Middaugh has professionally raced triathlon for 23 years. In 2015, Middaugh won the XTERRA World Championship. Now 47, he still competes at the elite level.

“What’s really fun for me is applying some of the concepts for athletes to general population,” Middaugh said.

“A lot of the bloodwork metrics, the VO2 max, the strength and power, the movement screen, all of those things are things that you can change with lifestyle interventions,” Middaugh said. “A lot of people think that a lot of these are mostly genetically determined, or rather fixed, and really, we know that those can all change if the stimulus is strong enough and the person is willing to make that change.”

What Healthspan includes

Each Healthspan participant is assigned a team of four experts: A wellness coach, a functional medicine clinician, a coach and a nutritionist.

The team designs a personalized health and fitness plan for each participant based on their goals and fitness test results, including scheduling their workouts, planning their nutrition and reviewing their medications.

“It ends up being a very well-rounded program with a lot of resources,” Middaugh said.

The program starts with the “Thrive assessment,” a series of nine health and fitness tests, including strength measures, body composition, balance, mobility and Middaugh’s favorite, a VO2 max test.

“VO2 max is considered the gold standard for aerobic capacity,” Middaugh said. “Recently, it has been tied to longevity because it is the single biggest predictor of all-cause mortality. And the reason is that it’s really a measure of all body systems working together.”

Participants and their team go through three rounds of goal setting, beginning with broad goals, specifying the targets through the baseline information provided by the assessments and then determining the daily commitment each participant is willing to make.

While some people in the program’s 175-person test group set performance-related goals, most set health-related goals, from lowering cholesterol levels to changing their body composition.

The program is available to everyone, with participants in the test group ranging in age from 20s to 80s.

“It’s really for anybody who wants to take agency and control of their own health,” Middaugh said.

Healthspan is designed to take eight months. One of the program’s overall aims is to help participants build healthy habits that last long after they finish their program.

How is Healthspan different?

What makes Healthspan unique is its combination of specific, individualized data with personalized coaching by experts.

“Health span is one of the fastest growing parts of health care right now, but nobody that we know of is doing quite the same model, with the lifestyle interventions, the programming and accountability,” Middaugh said. “There are a lot of people who are doing very robust testing, high-end diagnostics, but it’s a lot of information, very overwhelming, and they’re usually left to do all of the lifestyle interventions on their own.”

While many people sport wearable technology, from watches that track heartrate and athletic activities to rings that track sleep, most do not effectively process the data. 

“Almost all heart rate zones that you’ll see coming from Apple watch, from a Garmin, they’re almost all age predicted, and that works really well for about 20% of the population,” Middaugh said. “People are really in the dark, and some people are almost disenfranchised by wearing a heart rate monitor or tracking with anything, because those zones don’t work for them.”

The program is designed to work for everyone, from individuals who have not set foot in a gym in years to those that exercise regularly.

“Even people that have worked out three hours a week, five days a week, whatever it is,” Middaugh said. “Maybe they’re in a rut and have been doing the same things for a very long time. We want you to try something different, try something that is going to work a little bit better for you.”

“You need professionals to help you with this. No matter how experienced you think you are, having someone there to help you develop plans, to encourage you and to help hold you accountable … is key to this program,” said Will Cook, Vail Health’s president and CEO and Healthspan’s very first participant.

One participant’s experience

Cook’s goals included gaining muscle, losing fat and beating his 20-year-old nephew in a 5-kilometer race at Thanksgiving. In eight months, Cook improved his VO2 max from 40 to 55, increased his muscle mass and decreased his running pace from 10 minutes per mile to 7:21. Most importantly, he beat his nephew in the turkey trot.

Middaugh served as Cook’s coach, instructing him through zone two (easy) and interval (challenging) runs, guiding stretching and scheduling gym time. “He has changed my life by helping me figure out ways to change my diet and change my mindset and change my exercise regimen,” Cook said. 

“What he was able to achieve in a relatively short period of time was pretty outstanding,” Middaugh said.

With a coach and Healthspan team, “You always feel like you’ve got somebody there, not monitoring from a perspective of ‘I got you,’ but monitoring from a perspective of … ‘Do you feel like it’s helping you?'” Cook said. “That, for me, has been something different than I’ve ever had.”

The most challenging part of the program, for many participants, is making the behavioral change that it takes to exercise and eat differently than they are used to.

“Behavior change is very hard, but we know if somebody can commit to a program for eight months, they’ll have those habits,” Middaugh said. 

Committing to the program required Cook to change his behavior; fitting the workouts into his busy schedule was “the hardest part,” he said.

Cook’s team wanted him to do seven hours of exercise per week. “I probably was doing something more like five, but it was five more than I was doing before,” he said.

“Once you get that cadence in your calendar and you start to feel good, it’s no longer hard,” Cook said. “It’s just getting started that’s hard.”

He also knew when to take a break.

“Like dieting or saving or something like this, you can’t hold yourself to such a strict standard that you set yourself up for failure,” Cook said.

The program is conducting research as it goes to determine how upstream health interventions might save lives (and dollars) in the long run, as well as to see how consistent a participant needs to be with their designed program to see success.

“We’re seeing really good results even with people that are 50, 60% compliant,” Middaugh said.

Vail Health aims to make its findings available to the public as often as possible, both through live speaker events and through YouTube videos.

“We’re not dealing with secrets, we’re dealing with information that everybody can and should have access to,” Middaugh said. 

At the end of his first eight months, “I signed up for another cycle of it all because I feel better, I sleep better, I look better, and I want to keep it going,” Cook said.

High-level analysis comes at a price

The Healthspan program does come at an out-of-pocket cost. 

The lowest level, “Foundation,” costs $2,500 for eight months. The middle tier, “Elevate,” is $6,000. The highest tier, “Summit,” which involves four meetings per month with the team of experts, costs $10,000.

“Sometimes, there can be sticker shock, but the reality is, if you break it down into all the various services you’re getting and the number of hours you’re spending, it’s a very fair price,” Cook said.

For those that choose to take the plunge, “(Healthspan) is probably the single biggest thing that could change the trajectory of their lives,” Middaugh said.

“We all have busy lives, but think about it — five days a week for one hour, we can all afford it, and we all deserve it,” Cook said.

“And most of us can’t afford not to,” Middaugh said.