Cate Collings Pursues a Better Way

For: American Healthcare Leader

Early in her career, Cate Collings studied and worked in exercise physiology in a lab, testing Olympic athletes one day and cardiac patients the next. Between the two, the remarkable recovery of cardiac patients through exercise fascinated her the most. At age twenty-eight, she began medical school and eventually specialized in cardiology.

“My day-to-day practice was, of course, prescribing and titrating medications, seeing patients in the hospital, ordering tests, and so forth,” Collings recalls. “I realized at the time that even though I walked the walk and talked the talk and my patients knew me to be an advocate for lifestyle, there was very little I could get across in a clinical encounter in the office. Just providing patients with lifestyle counseling or education was insufficient. There needed to be healthcare system change to provide patients with the resources to be successful, because otherwise they often fail after resorting to fad nonevidence-based programs outside the walls of their healthcare.” 

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