Announcing the 2022 Building H Index

Today we’re excited to launch the 2022 Building H Index - a ranking of 37 of America’s best known companies on how their products and services affect human health, everyday. It’s a new way to think about How Health Happens.

What does that mean? How did we do it? 

Behind the Index is a data-driven assessment of health impacts across five behaviors - healthy eating, physical activity, sleep, social engagement, and time spent outdoors. We focus on four industries - Food, Housing, Transportation, and Entertainment - because these industries make up so much of our everyday lives and the environment where health happens. (Yes, we are nerds, and public health nerds at that.)

We created the Index because there is a crisis of chronic disease and illness in the U.S. that is the inevitable - if not intentional - result of the products and services that we love to use because they make life more easy, but not necessarily more healthy. This is our “product environment,” and it is not doing anything for our wellbeing. 

The conventional approach to this problem asks government policy or healthcare to take care of it. But the past 50 years have shown those solutions provide too little and arrive too late. 

So - let’s try a different approach. We believe that, if we’re going to meaningfully do something about this chronic disease crisis, the corporate sector in this country needs to step up. They need to Own the Outcome. With this Index we hope to offer specific, tangible criteria that can both hold companies accountable and that companies can use themselves as a framework for improvement.

There’s an excellent story in Fast Company about the 2022 Index by Adele Peters.

To dig in to the full Index, including individual company profiles and a drill-down into our methodology, go here.

Together, we can build health back into life.