Business Collaborative for Brain Health (BCBH) Roundtable

Krystal joined a BCBH-convened roundtable on September 14, 2023 to take up the underlying definitional question for the field: what is "brain health" and how should the private sector treat it. The session, moderated by Sarah Lock (Senior Vice President of Policy & Brain Health, AARP; Executive Director, Global Council on Brain Health), brought together Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman (Center for BrainHealth at UT Dallas), Dr. Lisa McGuire (Alzheimer's Disease Team, CDC), Krystal (then Shell Health Analytics), and Dr. Harris Eyre (Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University).

The roundtable worked through the overlap and distinctions between mental health, well-being, brain health, brain performance, mental illness, and dementia, and where the boundary sits between what employers can address and what belongs to clinical care. Krystal brought the employer measurement perspective into the conversation, anchoring the discussion in what large companies can credibly observe at scale and what falls outside their epistemic reach.

The output was Roundtable Brief #3, BCBH's third in a series of published syntheses from these convenings. The brief positions brain health as a higher-category construct that, when improved, produces spillover gains across emotional, physical, and neural health, and reframes employer investment from a compliance burden to a brain-capital strategy.