Family Offices Should Govern It Like an Asset
Founder & Chairman, CourMed® | The Private Health Office
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A major shift is taking place in private wealth management: health is increasingly being recognized as a foundational consideration in long-term wealth planning.
In an October 2026 sponsored Bloomberg feature, HSBC examined the expanding relationship between wellness and financial well-being. The article cited the Global Wellness Institute’s estimate that the U.S. wellness economy reached $2.1 trillion in 2024, representing approximately $6,293 per capita. HSBC’s Racquel Oden, Head of Wealth, Premier and Private Banking in the U.S., emphasized a fundamental point: for many individuals, the ability to work and earn is their largest financial asset. Investing in health can therefore help protect earning capacity.
The significance extends far beyond individual wellness. For family offices, health intersects directly with leadership continuity, human capital, enterprise resilience, and the long-term stewardship of wealth.
Yet recognizing the relationship between health and wealth is only the beginning. The more consequential question is how families govern the infrastructure surrounding health across their private environments.
Five years ago, CourMed recognized this emerging need and pioneered the Private Health Office model, establishing private-client health and wellness infrastructure as an essential consideration for family offices and significant estates. Now in its third year on the Morgan Stanley Reserved Living & Giving platform, CourMed operates at the intersection of private-client health and wellness and estate-level health security.
As private banks expand their health-related offerings, an important distinction emerges: CourMed’s Private Health Office addresses the estate-level governance and continuity requirements that individual wellness benefits and curated specialist networks do not independently provide.
Health Is Not a Tradable Asset Class
Health is not a conventional financial asset. It cannot be purchased, transferred, or managed like a security, real estate holding, or investment portfolio.
However, the capacity of a principal to lead, make decisions, steward capital, and sustain family responsibilities has measurable economic and governance value. Financial capital, physical assets, operating businesses, and family enterprises all depend on the individuals who direct and preserve them. Health underpins that human capacity.
A significant health disruption can affect executive judgment, earning power, family responsibilities, and enterprise continuity. For a single-family office or private fiduciary, these consequences extend far beyond an individual’s personal wellness.
Longevity makes this dynamic even more consequential. The CDC’s 2023 U.S. life tables illustrate that a person reaching age 40 has, on average, several additional decades of life expectancy. Longer lives can mean extended leadership responsibilities, additional caregiving obligations, and more generations participating simultaneously in wealth stewardship.
Health therefore warrants deliberate consideration within the broader governance of family assets and human capital.
A Wellness Benefit Is Not an Estate-Wide System
HSBC’s sponsored article describes a Premier-client wellness offering through Aspire, including access to a third-party wellness platform, telemedicine, discounts on fitness and nutrition services, and assistance identifying activities and caregiving resources.
These benefits serve a legitimate purpose: they provide individual clients with additional access, convenience, and lifestyle options.
However, an estate with multiple residences, household personnel, and internationally mobile family relationships presents a different operational challenge.
Who maintains the health-security framework across the family’s footprint? How are responsibilities defined? How does the family preserve operational continuity when principals move between residences and jurisdictions?
A retail wellness membership cannot independently answer those questions.
A wellness benefit provides access and convenience. Estate-level health security establishes an infrastructure framework for continuity, governance, and human-capital risk management.
The distinction is not about which offering is better; it is about recognizing that individual consumer benefits and estate-wide health infrastructure serve fundamentally different purposes.
What Family-Office Health Governance Can Include
A practical health-continuity framework helps a family clarify existing resources, operational responsibilities, and potential vulnerabilities.
Consider five core elements:
- Health-Resource Inventory: An organized understanding of existing wellness resources, relevant health directives where appropriate, and established clinical relationships.
- Information Governance: Clear permissions, privacy parameters, and responsible, compliant handling of sensitive health information.
- Residence-Specific Preparedness: Defined household responsibilities, appropriate resource identification, and emergency escalation procedures for each private property.
- Geographic Continuity: Structured planning for maintaining appropriate health and wellness resources as principals move between residences and international jurisdictions.
- Periodic Governance Reviews: Regular evaluations of evolving family requirements, succession considerations, and estate infrastructure needs.
This is not a formula for eliminating health risks; it is a framework for reducing avoidable uncertainty.
Citi Private Bank’s guide, Navigating Healthcare for Principals and Families, addresses the importance of organized health information, established clinical relationships, and geographic preparedness. Citi Wealth expanded this institutional focus in September 2026 with The Specialist Collection, a curated network of external specialists that includes Health & Wellness Advisory among seven categories alongside Cybersecurity and Personal & Physical Security.
J.P. Morgan Private Bank has taken a complementary approach. Its Lifestyle Services offering, introduced in September 2025 through its expanded Global Family Office Practice, includes healthcare-related resources among a broader range of operational services. Separately, its 23 Wall initiative provides institutional coverage for some of the world’s largest families.
Together, these developments reflect a growing recognition that private-bank relationships increasingly extend into operational needs beyond traditional wealth management.
But access to curated service directories and external referral networks is not the same as embedded estate health-security infrastructure. That distinction matters.
Family offices already enforce organized frameworks and defined roles to manage liquid portfolios, real estate, and physical assets. Human health security deserves comparable rigor.
My perspective on this issue has been shaped by years of examining the intersection of health security, wealth preservation, and family-office governance. I have explored these themes in my contributions to Crain Currency, including my August 2023 article, “What Family Offices Should Know About Today’s Health and Wellness Therapy.” The growing attention from private banks reinforces a position I have advanced for years: health security deserves a defined place in the architecture of family-office governance. For families with significant assets, that means moving beyond individual wellness benefits toward a structured framework for protecting human capital, preserving continuity, and governing health-related risk across the private estate.
The Private Health Office: An Infrastructure Layer
CourMed’s Private Health Office establishes a private-client health and wellness infrastructure layer within the family’s private environment.
Rather than being tethered to a single clinic, an individual physician, or a primary address, the PHO is engineered around the family’s broader estate footprint.
Dedicated Health Security Advisors (HSAs) support this framework at the estate level. Their role is to support infrastructure governance, establish operational clarity, and help maintain continuity within the boundaries of the family’s established clinical relationships. The HSA is not a substitute for a physician, does not diagnose or treat illness, and does not assume clinical decision-making authority.
CourMed’s Resident Privilege operationalizes this framework through three structured tiers:
- Principal: Designed around the individual principal’s health and wellness requirements.
- Estate: Extends the framework to the primary residence and family environment.
- Legacy: The highest tier, engineered specifically for multi-generational continuity across multiple residences, cross-border environments, and applicable household support staff.
This distinction matters: multi-location deployment and support-staff integration are Legacy-tier capabilities, not default features across every engagement.
The objective is to establish health and wellness infrastructure around the way an enterprise family actually lives, including its residential footprint, established preferences, and broader household environment.
Estate Governance: Clear Responsibilities, Defined Boundaries
Effective health governance requires unambiguous role definition.
Family members, estate managers, household staff, family-office executives, independent clinicians, and private service providers each carry distinct responsibilities. A structured framework establishes clear boundaries without granting unauthorized personnel access to private medical records or clinical decisions.
Cross-border estates introduce additional regulatory requirements. The UAE’s Ministerial Decree No. 51 of 2021 addresses circumstances under which health data and information may be stored or transferred outside the country, subject to specified conditions. Abu Dhabi’s Precision Medicine Policy establishes requirements concerning consent, confidentiality, and data protection.
International continuity requires careful alignment with applicable local legal frameworks. Families should obtain qualified legal and clinical counsel for their specific jurisdictions.
CourMed does not provide concierge medicine or replace established physician relationships. The Private Health Office is a non-clinical health-security infrastructure designed to support the private environment across the family’s estate footprint.
Longevity as Stewardship Across Generations
Longevity is about more than accumulating additional years; it is about preserving the human capacity to lead, contribute, care for others, and pass down values alongside financial assets.
For a family office, the principal is not simply a beneficiary of accumulated capital. The principal is often the driving force behind the enterprise, its strategic decisions, and the family’s future direction.
Wealth can be transferred. Real estate can be inherited. Operating companies can be recapitalized or sold. But the human capacity to create, steward, and enjoy those assets remains foundational.
Private banks are bringing health into the wealth conversation. Family offices can take the next step by establishing deliberate health-security governance around the people, residences, and responsibilities that sustain their legacies.
Health is not a retail wellness perk. It is foundational infrastructure in the architecture of generational wealth.
Authorizing Estate Health Security
CourMed’s Private Health Office® is deployed exclusively for single-family offices, enterprise principals, and established estates requiring private-client health-security infrastructure and estate-level continuity.