Most people think being healthy means not being sick. This limited view constrains how we approach our well-being and what we believe is possible.
At Banner Peak Health, we’ve developed a philosophy that shatters this traditional mindset. We call it “Outperform.”
Redefining Health Beyond Disease
We define medicine 2.0 as medical care that treats existing disease. When you’re sick, you see a doctor, get treatment, and return to “normal.” Health in this system means the absence of disease, nothing more.
Medicine 3.0 takes the next step: preventing disease before it occurs. We screen, test, and identify risk factors. This approach, which forms the foundation of concierge medicine, represents real progress.
But even prevention keeps the focus on disease.
What we’re pursuing at Banner Peak Health goes even further than medicine 3.0. We provide optimization: maximizing your potential, your function, your energy, and yes, your emotional well-being. It’s a different way to think about health.
Follow the Money
To understand this shift, we need to examine healthcare funding.
Traditional fee-for-service medicine relies on procedure codes based on either treating specific diseases or preventing specific diseases. There’s no funding mechanism for optimization.
Insurance companies don’t reimburse for helping someone feel extraordinary. Medicare doesn’t have billing codes for maximizing human potential. The financial structure of traditional healthcare ignores optimization.
Our practice operates on a different model. We’re funded by you, our patients. Not government programs. Not insurance companies.
This direct relationship allows us to build healthcare strategies that meet your needs, including the pursuit of optimal health. Our Outperform program’s financial and philosophical underpinnings rest on this foundation.
From Passive Patient to Active Participant
Outperform changes the question of healthcare. Instead of asking, “What can the medical system do for me?” our patients ask, “What can I do for myself with the medical system’s support?”
Traditional healthcare creates passive relationships. You wait until something goes wrong, then seek treatment. Even preventive care often feels like something done to you rather than with you.
Outperform demands active participation. You own your journey. We teach you how to fish while providing the best equipment and guidance available.
This change happens through what we call MDEC: the Metric-Driven Empowerment Cycle. We leverage current technology to provide real-time, actionable, personalized data that puts you in the driver’s seat.
Take heart rate variability monitoring through the Oura Ring, our preferred wearable device. This technology tracks the balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, measuring how well your body manages stress and recovery.
You generate the data. We guide you in understanding it. You own where that data takes you on your journey.
Continuous glucose monitoring is another example. Every five minutes, you know your blood sugar level. This integrates everything: stress, activity, sleep, nutrition, and meal timing. The data is personalized, actionable in real time, and yours to leverage.
Traditional medicine focuses on diagnostics and screenings, looking for problems. We focus on monitoring and metrics, tracking progress toward optimal function. One searches for what’s wrong. The other measures what’s possible.
Building Health Through Community
Traditional medicine focuses on individual behavior change. In reality, we all exist in a community. Why not approach healthcare through the lens of how we interact with others?
Society faces an epidemic of loneliness. Copious literature documents the negative biological outcomes of isolation. Social connection improves both emotional well-being and physical health. A human being connected in community is a healthier human being.
Many societal trends have decreased social cohesion. Life has become less social, a phenomenon the pandemic accelerated. Through Outperform, we’re connecting people wherever possible, using education and athletics as tools for bringing our community together.
We’ve launched a pilot program: weekly exercise classes open to the entire Banner Peak Health community and staff. These sessions create connection, shared goals, and mutual support.
The science of behavior change proves that people make better choices in a community. Whether through family relationships, friendships, or organized groups, connection drives healthier decisions. Data on marital status and health outcomes, social support and recovery rates, community involvement and longevity all point to the same conclusion.
Overcoming Traditional Healthcare Limitations
In traditional healthcare settings, implementing data-driven, personalized optimization is challenging.
The technology we use, including Oura Rings, continuous glucose monitors, and advanced metabolic testing, either lacks insurance coverage or requires too much time to implement under fee-for-service constraints.
Consider continuous glucose monitors. They’re available over the counter, but extracting meaningful insights from the data, understanding patterns, and making personalized recommendations requires labor-intensive processes that don’t fit into seven-minute appointment slots or insurance-reimbursable categories.
Traditional fee-for-service practices can’t provide this level of attention. We can.
Our position allows us to identify and adopt emerging technologies early. We evaluate innovations that improve the optimization process, from advanced sleep monitoring to new recovery tools. When something proves valuable, we can implement it without waiting for insurance approval or billing code creation.
Beginning Your Outperform Journey
For someone inspired to move from “not sick” toward optimal health, the most important step is openness.
Whatever approaches you’ve tried before and whatever you’re comfortable with won’t be as effective for moving forward as the new directions we can explore together. You don’t know what you don’t know.
The process we’re describing differs from traditional healthcare. If you’re open to rethinking the entire approach, we can take you somewhere extraordinary.
We’re reimagining what health means and what’s possible when you combine new technology, personalized data, community support, and medical expertise freed from insurance constraints.
Today’s Takeaways
Health means more than the absence of disease. It also means more than prevention.
True health optimization requires a change in how we approach well-being: from passive recipient to active participant, from isolated individual to connected community member, from accepting “normal” to pursuing extraordinary.
At Banner Peak Health, our Outperform philosophy makes this change possible. Through metric-driven empowerment, community connection, and freedom from traditional funding constraints, we’re creating healthcare that helps you maximize your potential.
The question isn’t whether you’re sick. The question is: How extraordinary could you feel?
