On Thursday, Dr. Wen spoke on a panel for Consumer Reports’ 80th Anniversary event with Julia Angwin, Senior Reporter at ProPublica, Michel Nischan, chef and food activist, and moderator Wendy Bounds, Executive Director, Content for Consumer Reports about the future of healthcare.On Thursday, Dr. Wen travelled to New York City to speak on a panel for Consumer Reports’ 80^th Anniversary event.

While on the panel, Dr. Wen discussed some of the crucial steps to health work in Baltimore City:

• Setting common goals and breaking down silos: through the B’More for Healthy Babies program, we help our most vulnerable community members with the intent to reduce infant mortality. In 2015, we had the lowest infant mortality rate ever recorded in the city.
• Digging deeper and investing early: through the Vision for Baltimore program, we are able to help young people in the city break down the barriers that prevent them from getting access to vision screening and glasses.
• Seeing people as solutions: in the Safe Streets program, residents get involved and become advocates to prevent problems from becoming violent in the streets.
• Understanding not just the cost of intervention, but the cost of doing nothing: with the outbreak of Zika, we see government agencies at all levels fighting about funding and how expensive it is to prevent spreading of diseases; however, the cost of doing nothing is much higher because of the risk for illnesses and deaths. As Dr. Wen likes to say, “public health saved your life today, you probably don’t know about it.”

Dr. Wen elaborated that health is not just about what happens in hospitals. Eighty percent of caring for our health is impacted by behaviors and environments outside of the hospital. Creating healthy environments means caring about and creating wellbeing. Dr. Wen’s final message to the audience focused on what everyone can do—“don’t talk about healthcare, talk about health.”