What To Expect When You Are Managing A Population Health Coalition

Collaboration among a litany of health care and community-based organizations (CBOs) has become a popular approach to pursuing health improvements in cities and towns across the United States. Examples of cross-sector coalitions can be found in the work of Way to Wellville, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative, and, in many cases, the winners of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) Culture of Health Prize. Over the past few years, health care and community-based providers have expressed to me a combination of excitement and fear about integrating their work with that of others. The prospect of finding partners to achieve more than one could alone is inspiring, and the prospect of losing oneself in the process is frightening. In March, I had the opportunity to moderate a session at the Learning in Collaborative Communities (LinCC) meeting in Denver, which was hosted by the Health Research & Educational Trust (affiliated with the American Hospital Association) and was funded by the RWJF. At the LinCC meeting, representatives of ten community-based collaboratives from across the country gathered to share experiences and develop skills to strengthen their hometown partnerships. I designed an exercise to elicit the hopes and fears of participants about working in these collaboratives. In advance of the meeting, I received the participant list and divided participants into three role-based groups according to the kind ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: GrantWatch Hospitals Population Health Public Health community-based organizations Health Philanthropy Health Promotion and Disease PreventionGW Health Research & Educational Trust Politics Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Source Type: blogs