Building H Releases 2022 Index, Ranking 37 Leading Companies on How Products Impact Customer Health

April 7, 2022 — Today Building H released the 2022 Building H Index, ranking 37 companies across four industries—entertainment, food, housing and transportation—on how their products and services impact the health of their customers. The ranking reflects how companies score across five health-related behaviors: healthy eating, physical activity, sleep, social engagement and time spent outdoors.

Akin to corporate rankings for sustainability, environmental impact or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the Building H Index serves as a yardstick to measure how the products millions of Americans use in their everyday lives affects their health in significant and measurable ways. Until now, these health outcomes have too often been overlooked, if not altogether ignored. By shining a light on this “product environment,” Building H hopes to inspire leaders and creators in the corporate world to consider the consequences of their products and services on the health of their customers and consumers. We ask them to Own the Outcome.

The companies ranked include some of the most successful companies of the past decade, including many that leverage technology to make our lives easier–if not necessarily more healthy. These include Uber and Lyft in the transportation category, Instacart and Amazon Fresh in the food category, and in the entertainment category, Disney+ and Netflix—which comes up dead last in our overall ranking.

“American health is in a crisis of chronic disease and illness that are the inevitable—if not intentional—result of the products and services that we love to use people they make life more easy—but not necessarily more healthy,” says Steve Downs, co-founder of Building H. “The corporate sector in this country needs to step up if we’re going to meaningfully do something about this chronic disease crisis. With this Index we hope to offer specific, tangible criteria that can be used two ways: We can hold companies accountable, and they can use it as a framework for improvement.”

The 2022 Building H Index, which includes a profile of each company and suggests opportunities for improvement, is available here.

About Building H

Building H is a not-for-profit project which aims to reverse the course of chronic disease in the U.S. by building health into everyday life. We believe the infrastructure of our daily life—our food, our transportation and housing, and our entertainment—can be reimaged with health and well-being as explicit design goals. Building H was founded in 2019 by Steve Downs, MS, the former chief technology and strategy officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and currently a lecturer at Stanford d.school, and Thomas Goetz, MPH, journalist and entrepreneur and co-founder of the award-winning health company Iodine.com, which he sold to GoodRx in 2016. Building H was selected as a “World Changing Idea” in health by Fast Company in 2021. Building H is a project of the Public Health Institute.