From Reactive to Active Healthcare

The Air Force is implementing a program called Human Performance Concept of Operations over the next several years to standardize and reinvigorate its healthcare for airmen, their dependents, and service retirees, according to a release. “If you want people to live at their maximum potential, you can’t just focus on when they’re getting sick or already hurt,” explained Lt. Col. Shane Steiner, 81st Aerospace Medicine Squadron chief of training health at Keesler AFB, Miss. “You have to go further and get them healthier than they were before,” he said. HP CONOPS focuses on items like evidence-based medicine and preventative care, states the June 29 release. Officials at Keesler are testing and refining one part of the program: the Base Operational Medicine Cell, which assigns a primary healthcare team to a specific group of airmen based on the airmen’s jobs. “We already do this with pilots and navigators and other aircrew, and now we want to apply that thinking to everybody,” said Steiner. “That specific healthcare team will know its patients, they’ll know the challenges that population has to being healthy, and they’ll be better at making them healthy,” he said.