Building a Systems Approach to Community Health and Health Equity for Academic Medical Centers

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Abstract A variety of staff and faculty within academic medical centers (AMCs) carry out activities to address aspects of community health, population health, population health management and health equity. Unfortunately, despite the robustness of many of these efforts, the lack of coordination and collaboration between players limits both the efficiency of these labors as well as their impact on local communities and the research, education and clinical goals of the AMC itself. As a result of health care reform and other drivers, identifying solutions to seemingly intransigent health and health care inequities and improving population health have become more urgent for AMCs who are now at financial risk for medical and social conditions over prolonged periods of time. Although opportunities exist to convene individuals who play similar roles across institutions so they might share lessons learned and spread successes, few if any meetings provide a protected space to gather individuals at institutions approaching issues of population and community health from distinct angles. To address this crucial gap, we propose a series of three annual workshops to convene four institutional teams comprised of the varied staff and their partners whose work focuses on community and population health with the aim of “Building a Systems Approach to Community Health and Health Equity for Academic Medical Centers”. Over the course of three proposed annual workshops, we aim to: AIM 1: Create a protected space for academic medical center teams (e.g. Community Benefit lead, Designated Institutional Official (DIO) responsible for GME accreditation, community-engaged scientist, Chief Medical Officer, Chief Quality Improvement Officer, etc.) and their public health and/or community partners to identify cross-over priorities and opportunities for enhanced programmatic and scientific collaboration and coordination; AIM 2: Deploy site- specific implementation plans that bring together clinical, research, educational and administrative community health efforts into a system of mutually reinforcing activities; AIM 3: Develop a research and evaluation strategy to enrich and assess the implementation of these site-specific plans and their outputs/outcomes for communities, the health system, and learners alike.