Medical schools and teaching hospitals are addressing health and health care inequities across their research, education, and clinical missions, but these efforts aren’t always coordinated across the institution. In the absence of coordination (and formal evaluation), community health initiatives are not as efficient or effective as they could be. A lack of coordination also makes it difficult to build the respectful and mutually beneficial community partnerships essential for this work.
To address these gaps, the AAMC in 2016 convened member institutions through a competitive application process to begin building sustainable community health systems that eliminate health inequities.
The initiative lasted three years and used a wealth of resources and tools (included below) designed to help academic health centers build a systems approach to community health and health equity by:
- Accounting for all community-relevant activities at their institution.
- Creating current and future state 'systems maps' documenting how these activities are (or could be) coordinated across mission areas.
- Identifying elements of the “future system” to implement.
- Identifying stakeholders in the “future system” and developing evaluation metrics that matter to them. (author abstract)