Happiness + Meaning = Well-being

What is quality of life?  Research indicates that "good days" include having experience of autonomy, competence and connection.

Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi formalized the study of positive psychology in 2000 and the field and grown exponentially since then.  Key concepts include developing your feelings of optimism and gratitude.  Volunteering is good for you!

Life satisfaction is also linked to having a sense of meaning for your life. 

Read more: Well-Being

This is an interesting article about community building. It is a sort of follow up to the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam.

One Neighbor at a Time by David Brooks.

Social Start Up Success:

How the best Nonprofits launch, scale up and make a difference

In the Beginning

The first thing is an IDEA. It begins with one person but is quickly shared with a core group, and then presented to a larger group of stakeholders. Feedback is rapidly integrated to revise the IDEA. Initial failures are perceived as opportunities for learning; initial successes are perceived as best practices to build upon.

 Measure Impact

Successful Nonprofits have developed a compelling ‘theory of change’ that they can easily articulate to stakeholders. Mechanisms are developed to collect data to support outcome measurement. Staff resources are deployed to help the data ‘tell a story’. It is valuable to select just a few data points that are easy for people to understand.

Read more: Social Start Up Success

The health care landscape is shifting from traditional fee-for-service models that incentivize volume of care toward value-based payment (VBP) models. VBP models create incentives for providers to improve health care quality and demonstrate better health outcomes at lower costs. Initially focused on physical health care, VBP models are becoming more prevalent in behavioral health, in part, because of the high costs associated with behavioral health conditions.

Recent research provides greater insight into this complex issue. A Milliman Research reportexamined the potential economic impact of integrating medical and behavioral health care and the cost of serving people with co-morbid conditions and a U.S. Government Accountability Office report prepared for Congress looked at behavioral health conditions as cost drivers in Medicaid.

Read more: Value Based Payment - Are you ready?