Background: Longevity and preventive medicine are rapidly gaining attention as people seek strategies to extend healthspan—the years of robust physical and cognitive function. While hospitalists primarily care for patients during acute illness, we should not exclude ourselves from this healthspan revolution. Hospitalization represents a powerful, underused opportunity to study resilience—the biological and functional capacity to withstand stress and recover.The Stanford Resilience & Longevity Initiative (STRIVE) was established in 2025 to position hospital medicine at the forefront of this movement. By viewing surgery or hospitalization as a biological stress test, hospitalists can explore why some individuals recover rapidly while others decline, advancing our understanding of both cognitive and physical resilience. The insights gained from these hospitalized populations can then be translated to the general population—informing prevention strategies, exercise and nutrition interventions, and early detection tools that help people maintain strength, independence, and vitality across the lifespan.
Purpose: To establish a multidisciplinary framework within hospital medicine that advances the study and promotion of physical and cognitive resilience as key determinants of healthspan. STRIVE seeks to identify, measure, and strengthen the biological and functional factors that influence recovery from illness and hospitalization through integrated research, clinical care, and education.
Description: The Stanford Resilience & Longevity Initiative (STRIVE) was launched with philanthropic funding to advance healthspan research. Its mission spans three pillars: research, education, and advocacy. STRIVE’s first study is already underway and uses point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) of muscle quantity and quality to create a measurable index of physical resilience, examining how baseline muscle health predicts length of stay, non-home discharge, and delirium in hospitalized adults. By integrating radiology, rehabilitation, and AI tools, STRIVE aims to identify early markers of resilience and enable real-time assessment. Educationally, STRIVE has launched community-facing webinars and is developing a broader initiative to translate clinical science into practical strategies for the public and clinicians. A revenue-generating lecture series for high school and undergraduate students will further sustain STRIVE’s mission and cultivate future clinicians fluent in resilience, aging, and longitudinal care.
Conclusions: STRIVE reframes hospitalization as a platform for both prevention and recovery—transforming the way we view acute care. By studying resilience at the bedside, STRIVE positions hospitalists as leaders in the healthspan revolution and key contributors to the evolving science of healthy aging. Through its integrated approach—combining clinical research, education, and community engagement—STRIVE aims to bridge the gap between illness and wellness, using lessons from hospitalization to help people stay stronger, recover faster, and live longer, healthier lives.