Philanthropy and Beyond: Creating Shared Value to Promote Well-Being for Individuals in Their Communities.

Health care organizations can magnify the impact of their community service and other philanthropic activities by implementing programs that create shared value. By definition, shared value is created when an initiative generates benefit for the sponsoring organization while also generating societal and community benefit. Because the programs generate benefit for the sponsoring organizations, the magnitude of any particular initiative is limited only by the market for the benefit and not the resources that are available for philanthropy.

HealthPartners adopts community business model to deepen focus on nonclinical factors of health outcomes.

Clinical care contributes only 20 percent to overall health outcomes, according to a population health model developed at the University of Wisconsin. Factors contributing to the remainder include lifestyle behaviors, the physical environment, and social and economic forces--all generally considered outside the realm of care. In 2010 Minnesota-based HealthPartners decided to target nonclinical community health factors as a formal part of its strategic business plan to improve public health in the Twin Cities area.

The simple health system rules that create value.

In 1991, Plsek sought to improve the quality of health care by challenging the readers of Crossing the Quality Chasm to find the few simple rules that might guide the local development of the 21st century health system. We have analyzed our health system's activities in the context of systems science as it seeks to create value (improve population health and patient experience, and reduce costs) for its stakeholders. We have concluded that 5 rules are simultaneously necessary and sufficient for success: 1) The stakeholders agree on a set of mutual, measurable goals for the health system; 2) the extent to which the goals are being achieved is reported to the public; 3) resources are available to achieve the goals; 4) stakeholder incentives, imperatives, and sanctions are aligned with the agreed-on health system goals; and 5) leaders among all stakeholders endorse and promote the agreed-on health system goals.

Measuring health care access and quality to improve health in populations.

Poor health status, rapidly escalating health care costs, and seemingly little association between investments in health care and health outcomes have prompted a call for a "pay-for-performance" system to improve population health. We suggest that both health plans and clinical service providers measure and report the rates of 5 behaviors: 1) smoking, 2) physical activity, 3) excessive drinking, 4) nutrition, and 5) condom use by sexually active youth. Because preventive services can improve population health, we suggest that health plans and clinical service providers report delivery rates of preventive services.

Partnering care delivery and research to optimize health.

A close partnership between care delivery and research organizations has the potential to provide essential elements needed to optimize health and health care. This clinical leadership panel, held during the 14th Annual Health Maintenance Organization Research Network (HMORN) Conference, identifies the value, opportunities and challenges of those close partnerships between three HMORN care delivery and research organizations. The objectives of this plenary session were: (1) identify the important facets of partnership that bring value to care delivery and research, (2) pinpoint the critical alignments of care delivery and research that are needed to fulfill the promised value between clinical and research organizations, and (3) recognize the challenges that clinical and research organizations need to address.

Crossroads in quality.

Expanding insurance coverage is a critical step in health reform, but we argue that to be successful, reforms must also address the underlying problems of quality and cost. We identify five fundamental building blocks for a high-performance health system and urge action to create a national center for effectiveness research, develop models of accountable health care entities capable of providing integrated and coordinated care, develop payment models to reward high-value care, develop a national strategy for performance measurement, and pursue a multistakeholder approach to improving population health.

The boomers are coming: a total cost of care model of the impact of population aging on health care costs in the United States by Major Practice Category.

Objective: To project the impact of population aging on total U.S. health care per capita costs from 2000 to 2050 and for the range of clinical areas defined by Major Practice Categories (MPCs).