Inflection 11: Scaling Wellness Through Rapid Community Health Improvement X-Prizes

What if HHS Inspired a National Competition to
Reverse Chronic Disease—Community by Community?

In the early days of space exploration, it wasn’t governments alone that drove progress—it was incentive. The X-Prize Foundation helped launch reusable rockets, sequence the human genome faster, and to develop new carbon removal technologies. What if that same model were used to transform health in American communities?

What if a series of X-Prizes were awarded to inspire communities to introduce AI-powered health transformation programs intended to produce verifiable health outcomes in three years? Winning entries would receive national recognition, ongoing support, and compete for grants to scale. Communities would compete not just for bragging rights, but to restore local vitality, extend life expectancy, and dramatically reduce the burden of preventable chronic illness.

The Strategy: Incentivize Innovation Where It Matters Most

The X-Prize for Rapid Community Health Improvement would invite coalitions of clinicians, public health leaders, technologists, educators, wellness professionals, and community organizations to design and deploy AI-powered, food-forward, family-centered, behavior change systems.

Rather than prescribing a single method, the competition could reward demonstrated results in:

• Reducing preventable chronic disease diagnoses and growth
• Improving biometrics across age groups
• Sustaining behavior change through coaching and self-health certification
• Improving mental health, social interaction, student performance
• Building equitable access to healthy foods and wellness resources
• Documenting savings in emergency care, prescriptions, hospitalizations

Each solution must be data-driven, family-friendly, culturally relevant, and scalable—with AI playing a meaningful role in health knowledge delivery, tracking, or predictive modeling.

Execution Roadmap: Building the Challenge

1. Seed Funding & Host Partners
Recruit founding sponsors—philanthropic (e.g., Wellcome Trust), private sector (e.g., Microsoft AI for Health), federal (e.g., HHS, USDA)—to fund prize pools starting at $25M across three tiers:

• Local pilots: $1M
• Regional scaling: $5M
• National champion: $10M+

2. Develop Guidelines & Metrics
Set clear, measurable target goals:

• Chronic disease diagnosis avoidance, decline and reversal
• BMI/obesity rates
• Mental health diagnosis decline and reversal
• Physical activity increases
• Nutritional behavior shifts
• Stress reduction or sleep quality metrics
• Health as a community priority

3. Launch a 2-Year Competition/Beta Test Cycle

• Quarter 1: Review and evaluate proven programs, name first tier awards
• Quarter 3: Create partnerships and plans between suppliers and communities.
• Quarter 5: Launch, monitor participant uptake, evaluate early impact results
• Quarter 7: Map out community-wide scale and recruit organizational participants

4. Judge Panel & Review
Include experts from:

• Policy, government, economic, technology, sustainability stakeholders
• Hospital systems, universities, alternative medicine, insurance, chambers of commerce
• Community health innovators (e.g., Blue Zones, Food Forest Abundance, Compassionate Frome’ Project, Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, Chopra Library/Whole Health Institute, Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program, Whole Cities Foundation)
• AI health systems (e.g., Cleveland Clinic, IBM Watson Health, Medical Futurist Institute, StartUp Health, Singularity, Schmidt Sciences)
• Learning and behavior change science: Stanford Behavior Design Lab, Behavior Change for Good Initiative (BCFG), Science of Behavior Change (SOBC)
• Public health equity (e.g.; American Public Health Association (APHA), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), Direct Relief’s Fund for Health Equity)

5. Scale and Support Winning Models
Winners receive ongoing technical support, software tools, matching grants, and priority access to future funding.

Existing Programs That Show It’s Possible

• Blue Zones Project – Fort Worth, TX
  In five years, Fort Worth residents improved well-being scores, reduced smoking rates, and lowered obesity metrics—all without pharmaceuticals.
• Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center
  Combines community action with data-informed health improvement to address health disparities in underserved populations.
• Whole Health Institute – Bentonville, AR
  Led by Alice Walton, this center is designing a patient-empowered, integrative model of care that focuses on root causes and prevention.
• AI for Health Programs – Microsoft, Stanford, and WHO
  Use machine learning to predict health outcomes, guide patient education, and identify community risk trends before symptoms emerge.

Key Resources to Recruit

• Academic Health Centers: Public health schools to help document outcomes
• AI & Data Science Teams: Provide models and dashboards for tracking metrics
• Clinicians & Coaches: Train community wellness leaders in functional approaches
• Schools & Faith Institutions: Trusted messengers for behavior change
• Grocery Chains & Food Policy Advocates: Partner to improve access and affordability
• Stakeholder Employees: Pharmaceutical, agriculture, food manufacturing and legacy medicine

How It Succeeds

This X-Prize flips the paradigm from managing disease to scaling health. When stakeholders are invited to create bold solutions—and supported with real funding, trusted local leadership, and AI-enhanced insight—transformation happens. With success stories, families across America can see what works and replicate it—fast.

This is more than a contest. It’s a call to heal—community by community, coach by coach, meal by meal, ensuring that the US population is the 4^th healthiest in the world by 2035.

Truth, Clarity, & the Fine Print

Are You Interested in Making a Difference? Click here to get involved with the LBNC Ten Year Health Transformation Challenge. Let’s work together to make the U.S. the 4th healthiest nation in the world by 2035.

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Life by Natural Causes (LBNC) is a Knowledge-to-Health Outcomes Learning System designed to engage users in behavior changes that will result in positive health outcomes, all under the guidance of their own health team. LBNC, currently in Beta development, has a launch target of 3QCY25.

Medical Disclaimer: Only licensed MDs are authorized to make medical claims. We connect you with professionals trained to support and optimize your health outcomes. Always consult your physician—ideally one trained in functional medicine—or another qualified provider regarding any medical concerns.

Editorial Disclaimer: Our Take is an opinion series from the Life by Natural Causes (LBNC) team, offering our perspective on health, wellness, and the systems that shape them. Grounded in research and real-world experience, these views reflect our mission to inspire healthier outcomes. We invite you to reflect—and share your take with us.