All That Jazz: Links Between the Sounds of Newport and Health

It's also sponsoring jazz festivals in Chicago, Monterey, Sydney and Paris this year.

The company is being spun off from Cardinal Health, and will be independent on Sept. 1. The jazz sponsorships seem to be a way of building its brand. Marketing consultant Ronda Thomas Farrell, the CEO of The Exordium Group, which advises CareFusion, earlier this year explained them this way to the Associated Press:

We saw how jazz was being used to teach listening skills in medical schools like Baylor, and that a significant number of clinicians and administrators are also professional-level jazz musicians.

And CareFusion's CEO, David Schlotterbeck, who once played drums, told the AP (here):

I'm a musician myself and I'm really looking forward to participating in these festivals...The fact that jazz represents a stream of complex information really plays into how medical practitioners have to process information so that they can improvise a solution.

Believing in "the healing power of music," CareFusion plans to transmit live feeds from festival concerts to hospitals, which they can air on their own network for patients and professionals. It has its own jazz website, which says:

There is a clear connection between jazz and medicine. Music is medicine and has the power to heal. Medical care and music are also fundamentally human, driven and forever changed by the interaction between caregiver and patient, musician and listener. 

Quite a proselytizer! Although there's a lot of unproven mumbo-jumbo about the connection between the arts and health care, there are also many promising theories and experiments. As I've mentioned before (here), exploration in the area is well worth pursuing. 

It will be worth watching, when -- Aug. 7 to 9 -- the Newport festival takes place, featuring Chaka Khan, with the George Duke Trio, Tony Bennett and Branford Marsalis, among many others, and hospitals tune in. CareFusion is taking applications from hospitals on its jazz website.