COVID@Heart

A healthy lifestyle underlies adequate cardiovascular risk management. However, current initiatives to promote a healthy lifestyle are only sparsely connected and often do not involve the patient's environment. To solve this, cardiologists, neurologists, general practitioners, scientists, entrepreneurs, and patients have united in the BENEFIT project. The research  Our mission is to make healthy living fun. Rather than telling people how to behave, we make healthy lifestyle choices appealing: the carrot is mightier than the stick. BENEFIT is an advanced loyalty program that rewards cardiovascular patients for the time and energy spent on healthy lifestyle activities. BENEFIT loyalty points can be earned for a range of health behaviors, such as exercising daily, abstaining from smoking, attending prevention programs, and showing up for health appointments. The BENEFIT program has different levels, ranging from a simple to use card-and-beacon system to an advanced digital platform that allows access to evidence-based lifestyle maintenance interventions, personal coaching, and smart technology. By rewarding everyday lifestyle and adherence behaviors, the program integrates care and non-care settings and facilitates embedding the new lifestyle in everyday life. Our goal is to create a national ecosystem in which evidence-based interventions to promote a healthy lifestyle are embedded in a system that rewards people for taking actions that contribute to such a healthy lifestyle. The central element of this ecosystem is a sophisticated loyalty program that encourages people to live healthy lifestyles for the long term. No more finger-pointing: the very act of rewarding a healthy lifestyle is stimulating! The ecosystem that we provide connects public and private parties, integrates existing care and lifestyle programs, has future-proof financing, and is constantly fed by scientific insights. BENEFIT for all! The origin The BENEFIT program is a public-private ecosystem in a national consortium, aiming to support patients with cardiovascular disease in their own home setting for a long-term healthy lifestyle. The Heart Foundation aims for more people to make healthy choices, so that they feel vital and run less risk of developing (again) cardiovascular diseases, which was one of the themes of the research agenda. Therefore, the Dutch Heart Foundation and ZonMw have collaborated to fund this program.

Promoting a healthy lifestyle and maintaining it for a long time is crucial for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Lifestyle change areonly sustainable and impactful if it takes into account the context in which it occurs. The research Therefore, this netwerk will disseminate this insight widely to policymakers, researchers and everyone who contributes to promoting healthy behaviors. In this way, we can collectively achieve greater health gains when implementing potentially successful interventions. The ultimate goal is to achieve sustainable and impactful lifestyle change in the population. In the projects LIKE, BENEFIT and SUPREME NUDGE, unique expertise has been gained in the field of (1) embedding lifestyle interventions in complex systems, and (2) changing systems underlying lifestyle behavior. Within this national network, we want to disseminate and embed this expertise among researchers, practice professionals and policy makers. We will combine this expertise in the form of two toolboxes; a toolbox for practice professionals and policy makers and a toolbox for researchers. To this end, existing tools will be adapted, where necessary, to make them more widely usable. We aim to embed the toolboxes in (existing) structures and will make the toolboxes findable and disseminated through this netwerk. This network will serve as a structure for connections between stakeholders and contribute to the realization of a sustainable knowledge infrastructure. With this project we identify and create important conditions for successful further development and upscaling of innovative and sustainable ways to sustain healthy living for longer. With this we go further than many existing networks and knowledge infrastructures that focus only on 'effective interventions' but not on the structural embedding in systems or addressing the systems themselves. The origin From 2017, the Dutch Heart Foundation, together with ZonMw, invested in research by three healthy living consortia (LIKE, BENEFIT and SUPREME NUDGE). The common goal was to find new ways to achieve sustainable and impactful lifestyle change in the population. Heart Foundation and ZonMw asked the three healthy living consortia Supreme Nudge, LIKE and Benefit to join forces within this theme by using the knowledge they have gained over the past few years. Although the three consortia each had a different approach, the research leaders agreed on what is needed for lifestyle change to be truly successful: a shift in thinking about lifestyle change. Subsequently, the Dutch Heart Foundation and ZonMw provided follow-up funding to join forces and acquired knowledge in a new knowledge infrastructure.