In Sickness and in Health: Nemours Children’s Health Vision Goes Well Beyond Medicine
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
Dr. Larry Moss, president and CEO of Nemours Children’s Health, shares a story about one of his patients as a way to explain the strategy behind the organization’s new brand, “Well Beyond Medicine,” launched in mid-September.
Early in his career as a surgeon, Moss was called to the ED to evaluate a 10-year-old boy, Wendell, who had an infection on his leg. “I knew at once it was necrotizing fasciitis, or what is commonly referred to as flesh-eating bacteria,” Moss says. To treat the infection, he had to remove 90 percent of Wendell’s skin. Wendell survived but with lifelong disabilities.
R. Lawrence Moss, MD, FACS, FAAP, president and CEO, Nemours Children’s Health
How did Wendell get the infection in the first place? He was playing in a trash dump — because there were no parks or playgrounds where he lived.
Unwinding the rest of the story, Moss describes systemic issues that cascade down, contributing to poor health outcomes: generational poverty, lack of education and job skills, chronic unemployment or underemployment, poor nutrition, lack of access to health care.
Most of children’s health — up to 80 percent — is determined by what happens outside care settings, Moss notes. What if, instead of treating preventable diseases, the health care industry invested in improving the world children live in?
Here, we will learn about Nemours Children’s plan to become a model for pediatric care transformation, and how its new brand and marketing campaign communicate the vision.