Expanding Access to Lifestyle Medicine for All

Health equity is at the heart of ACLM’s mission. Through the HEAL Initiative, our members are breaking down barriers to make lifestyle medicine accessible to all—because where you live, work, and play shouldn’t determine your health. Learn how clinicians across the country are leading the way.

The ACLM HEAL Initiative 

The Health Equity Achieved through Lifestyle Medicine or HEAL Initiative is a growing community of ACLM members who are dedicated to addressing lifestyle-related chronic disease health disparities. It supports the Community-engaged Lifestyle Medicine (CELM) model, an evidenced-based, participatory framework capable of addressing health disparities through lifestyle medicine.  

Supporting patients no matter the barrier 

Working through the nuances of complex healthcare delivery systems, ACLM members, many of whom are part of the HEAL Initiative community, still manage to overcome obstacles to lead CELM framework principles—community engagement, cultural competency, and application of intersectoral and multilevel approaches—in various healthcare settings. Here are examples of each principle in action: 

1. Community Engagement: an example of lifestyle medicine application would involve training health coaches or other members of the interdisciplinary team who may be from the very community that is historically under-resourced. In 2023, for instance, NYC Health + Hospitals rolled out a city-wide Plant-based Lifestyle Medicine Program. The pilot program staffed up a clinician team that included health coaches and community health workers to help patients navigate cultural, familial, socioeconomic, psychosocial, health literacy, and other factors that may shape eating patterns.
    
2. Cultural Responsiveness: comes alive in practice when a patient’s culture, context, and practices are at the core of each encounter, including providing access to translating services and bilingual providers. The Eliminating Barriers Initiative at Northwell Health in New York City was created to improve self-efficacy by reducing SDoH and addressing the disproportionate rates of diabetes among Black, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian patients. The program’s care team is multilingual, addressing the language barrier many of the patients experience.
    
3. Multilevel: an innovative approach in this domain involves, for example, holding a lifestyle medicine educational session and/or class in the region’s largest grocery store. HealthPoint Community Health Center in Kent, Washington partnered with local grocery stores in a Pacific Islander community to make informed recommendations on traditional ingredients to patients seeking nutritional guidance without compromising their culture. In addition, the clinicians partnered with the local church, a huge influential component of this community’s culture, to learn more about the community needs around health and nutrition.
   
4. Intersectoral: cross-sector organizations come together to understand the community needs of the population and identify unique resources of each organization to land on a coordinated approach to lifestyle-based change. By fostering collaborative community projects and partnerships with organizations like the YMCA and community health centers, the Be Healthy QC, a program of the Quad City Health Initiative in Iowa and Illinois, works to align all sectors from policy to environmental changes to create a “culture of wellness” that supports healthy lifestyle habits anchored in nutrition and physical activity. 

Creating a Lifestyle Medicine Workforce Rooted in Cultural Humility
 

The HEAL Initiative Scholarship Program 

The HEAL Initiative Scholarship, a companion program to the HEAL Initiative, was created to help diversify the medical workforce. Now in its fifth year, the scholarship is for clinicians who self-identify as a member of a group historically underrepresented in medicine (UIM). Research tells us that when a patient is treated by a provider who looks like them, the patient is more likely to have better health outcomes. To date, ACLM has awarded nearly 80 clinicians with the HEAL Initiative Scholarship. In 2024, more than 70% passed the ABLM/ACLM board exam and are now board-certified in lifestyle medicine. 

The National Training Initiative

Regardless of ability to pay, more than 30 million people from some of the most under-resourced communities seek care from Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which are uniquely positioned to partner with a wealth of community resources to help patients navigate social drivers of health that impede their ability to live healthy lifestyles. Last year, ACLM launched the National Training Initiative (NTI) to equip health center clinicians with training and education to address lifestyle-related chronic disease health disparities. In general, health center patients are uninsured, publicly insured, have low incomes, or are people of color. These groups are also disproportionately burdened by lifestyle-related chronic disease. Through the National Training Initiative, primary care providers at health centers nationwide are eligible for scholarship funding to support training and education in lifestyle medicine. Learn about the first NTI cohort.  

At ACLM, we believe lifestyle medicine is the foundation for all health and healthcare. We also believe in and support efforts that make lifestyle medicine accessible to all people—those living in rural communities, those living in neighborhoods where safe places to exercise are out of reach, and those who simply can’t afford fresh produce. Together, our members are actively meeting the needs of all and are generous to share their strategies.   

Join the HEAL Initiative today and be part of the work our members are doing to connect patients to lifestyle medicine solutions and resources where they work, live, work, play, and pray.