Calling on Healthcare and Human Services Partnerships: Help Advance Research to Benefit Well-Being of US Communities

NEW YORK, January 4, 2017 — Organizations engaged in healthcare-human services partnerships are urged to join an important research project to help all Americans lead healthier lives.

Along with the increasing focus across the country on healthcare quality and cost comes an increasing recognition of the important role that social determinants of health — such as housing, food security, education, employment — play in the overall well-being of US people and communities.

The growing and widespread effort to improve broad health outcomes by addressing both medical and social needs is driving interest in partnerships between healthcare organizations and community-based organizations (CBOs) that provide human services. These partnerships are often innovative, complex, and nascent, and there is a need to collect and codify the key financial, operational, cultural, and strategic ingredients for success.

Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF), the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS), and the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities (Alliance), with generous support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have partnered to capture and share learnings and emerging best practices for successful partnerships between healthcare and community-based organizations, particularly those that serve low-income and/or vulnerable populations.

Over the course of 12 months, the Partnership for Healthy Outcomes will field a national Request for Information (RFI) to collect data about promising partnerships already underway; select up to five partnerships to feature as case studies illustrating a variety of partnership models, and widely share the broad data, key findings, and case studies via publications, webinars, and other channels. This project will learn from and build on others’ ongoing efforts in this area.

Today, the Partnership invites CBOs (in housing, workforce development, early childhood education, etc.) and healthcare organizations (hospitals, health systems, providers, insurers, etc.) that are engaged in partnerships to share their experiences and help advance this important field. Completing the survey at this link should only take about 30 minutes and will help identify promising models of and challenges to building effective partnerships; inform funding and policy; and advance such partnerships across the nation. This survey closed on January 27, 2017.