Strategies

Provide patients with prescriptions for exercise plans, often accompanied by progress checks at office visits, counseling, activity logs, and exercise testing

Offer payments, credits toward health insurance premiums, or other financial rewards to encourage employees to lose weight, eat more healthily, quit smoking, engage in physical activity, etc.

Provide outreach and support to assist those whose employers do not offer affordable coverage, who are self-employed, or who are unemployed

Increase patients’ health-related knowledge via efforts to simplify health education materials, improve patient-provider communication, and increase overall literacy

Provide messages that support physical activity to large and broad audiences using television, social media, radio, billboards, newspapers, and other print media

Regulate mental health insurance to increase access to mental health services, including treatment for substance use disorders

Provide physical infrastructure (e.g., bike parking or showers), educational or social support (e.g., walking groups), and financial incentives that support active commuting

Establish transportation services for areas with low population densities using publicly funded buses and vans on a set schedule, dial-a-ride transit, volunteer ridesharing, etc.

Promote walking and biking to school through education, incentives, and environmental changes; often called SRTS

Expand or enhance school-based physical education (PE) by lengthening existing classes, increasing physical activity during class, adding new PE classes, etc.