Why Outdoor Recreation Roundtable is emphasizing getting patients outside

Each week, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

The great outdoors: not just great to look at, but also great for your health.

And don’t just take our word for it—numerous studies have been conducted on the many mental and physical health benefits. According to nonprofit Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) President Jessica Turner, “120 minutes outside [weekly] improves sleep, reduces stress, eases depression, boosts your immune function, and you feel more part of a society.”

ORR represents roughly 110,000 outdoor recreation businesses in the industry that employ 5.2+ million people in the US. It’s also an industry that has much potential for experimentation and collaboration, as Turner shared in our conversation below, valued at making up $696.7 million of the US economy in 2024.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What sorts of health benefits have been seen with continued outdoor exposure?

The benefits are numerous and they’re endless and the data is extensive and mapped out. It’s everything from mental health, lower cortisol, and stress hormones to physical health. Obviously, great for your heart health, good for your gut, important for your vision…you feel less lonely when you’re outside.

Can you describe nature prescriptions?

We had some of the founders of the [nonprofits] Parks Prescriptions and Nature Rx programs with us at our health forum a couple weeks ago, and it’s where doctors are identifying that there are gaps in people’s health…and they know that time outside in a park or a playground or green space is going to help them. And instead of writing a prescription for a drug, or maybe in addition to, they’re saying, “And I want you to go to this park this weekend, and I want you to take a walk.”

What are some of the partnerships or collaborations your organization has for research or to make this information more accessible?

REI Co-op is one of our members, and they’re funding the Nature and Health Alliance, which is an alliance of doctors, professors, and researchers who study this connection to go and train the American College of Lifestyle Medicine on [nature and the outdoors benefits].

We launched two new grant programs to help with the connection to rural health…investing in rural communities to help connect their outdoor infrastructure and to make sure that communities can build their own identity around the outdoors and health. We’re going to be granting money to communities across the country in the coming months in rural areas that want to connect the outdoors to health and use it as an economic development pathway.

We’re focused on the Intermountain West for one portion of the grant program, and the other grant program could really be any community across the country that has raised their hand and said that they want to use outdoor recreation as an economic development tool. These are often transitioning economies, maybe transitioning away from timber or fossil fuels or just using the recreation economy to supplement traditional industries.

Do you have any plans to partner directly with hospitals or any smaller facilities, too?

We’re really excited about what [Barton Health is] doing in the Tahoe region. Would love to see [its wellness walks become] scalable, but in the meantime, we’d love to use it as a proof point. What did it cost for that hospital system to make the changes necessary to bring the outdoors in and bring people outdoors as soon as they possibly can? What does that do to healing time? What does that do to the families that have to visit day in and day out? And how can other hospital systems learn from them?

What are some of the goals you have planned?

I dream of a day where you can get reimbursed or you can use your HSA and FSA accounts to buy not just your Peloton but your outdoor bike, to buy your kids’ helmets, to get your national park pass, to get your ski lift tickets.

I’m really thinking optimistically about how we integrate more deeply with the healthcare system, the reimbursement side of it as well as the insurance provider side. We have to be seen as a legitimate upstream solution and preventative care in our health system that lowers healthcare costs, and we are there. [The forum] a few weeks ago showed us we have evidence, we have the data, we have the doctors.