Giving Compass' Take:

• The Aspen Institute published a talk by the organization's President and CEO Dan Porterfield at a recent event in which he discusses how compassion and preventative medicine need to take center stage in today's healthcare landscape.

• Nonprofits involved in the health sector should examine the bullet points of this speech, especially the emphasis on inclusion and the need for more advocacy in a fraught political environment.

• Here's more on how a flexible model for health can help transform communities. 

Aspen Institute President and CEO Dan Porterfield delivered remarks at the 2018 Spotlight Health Opening Session. He spoke during the Aspen Ideas Festival in the Greenwald Pavilion on the campus of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, CO.

"There is an enormous amount of change taking place right now, from how we provide health care in the U.S. and fight cancer in Africa to how we harness the power of design thinking and implement strategies to reduce the cost of medicine. We will take you to the cutting-edge of genetics, propose novel ways to prevent chronic disease, and share insights about the microbiome. And we’ll talk about where visionaries and venture capitalists think we’ll go next.

"It’s especially important that we work in a non-partisan, open-minded way, gathering perspectives inclusively, willing to entertain ideas that don’t appeal to us, unafraid of dissonance, always asking critically if we have drawn enough voices to the table and done so respectfully.

"I suspect that there are a few core convictions shared by us all.

"One, for example, is that advances in access and excellence in health care offer the people of our planet a greater quality of life than ever before — and thus we must keep questioning, keep learning, keep researching, keep discovering, and keep sharing the tools and treatments that can enable still greater human flourishing.

"A second conviction is that it’s a lot smarter for any society to prevent illnesses than to resort only to treating them, and that it’s also a lot smarter to empower people to take care themselves rather than scrambling around trying to save them and stop the spread of further harm in desperate moments after a preventable calamity."

Read the full article about health and human dignity by Dan Porterfield at The Aspen Institute.