Insights From Implementation Of A Community-Based Model For Collaborative Public Good Investing.

Communities across the United States are looking for ways to reduce health inequities. Improving the social determinants of health (SDOH) is one fruitful pathway. In prior work we developed a financing model to incentivize and coordinate joint SDOH investments among local stakeholders, called the Collaborative Approach to Public Good Investments (CAPGI). A core thesis of our model is that at least some SDOH investments can be funded without reliance on philanthropic or government monies: Because they can produce value that flows to multiple organizations simultaneously, SDOH investments can be aligned with health organizations' self-interest. We describe our model's evolution in practice and synthesize insights drawn from our experiences providing technical assistance to three communities that have implemented CAPGI. Each community is unique, but we identified common themes related to governance processes and coalition dynamics that are relevant to any community trying to increase local, place-based investments in health.

Trust in Health Care and Science: Toward Common Ground on Key Concepts.

This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report "Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science." These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being trustworthy, building and borrowing trust as distinct strategies, and challenges to trustworthiness posed by the contingent nature of science. Together, these insights stand to advance an area of research that we believe has been historically stymied by conceptual confusion and a long-standing insistence on treating trust as a purely instrumental good.

Business-nonprofit hybrid organizing: a dynamic approach to balancing benefits and costs.

Introduction: Efforts to address complex public health challenges can benefit from cross-sector collaboration, while also fostering growing business sector engagement in promoting health equity. What form business-nonprofit collaboration should take, however, is a difficult question for managers and leaders. Hybrid organizational forms, which combine for-profit and nonprofit elements within a single organization in unconventional ways, offer an innovative and potentially promising approach. Yet, while existing typologies of cross-sector collaboration have identified hybrid forms at one end of a continuum of possible forms of collaboration, these typologies do not differentiate the diversity such hybrid forms may take, and the costs and benefits of these innovative hybrid forms are poorly understood. This leaves managers interested in promoting public health through business-nonprofit hybrid organizing with limited guidance about how to maximize potential merits while mitigating drawbacks. Methods: We performed a qualitative comparative case study of three examples of business-nonprofit hybrid organizing. Data collection included 113 interviews with representatives from 42 organizations and observation of case study activities. We used thematic analysis within and across cases to characterize the form of hybrid organizing in each case and to examine benefits and costs of different forms for supporting initiatives. Results: We identified two hybrid, collaborative forms - Appended and Blended forms. Each form had benefits and costs, the significance of which shifted over time contingent on changing strategic priorities and operating environments. Benefits and costs of particular forms become more or less important for establishing and sustaining initiatives under different conditions, requiring a dynamic view. Discussion: No particular form of business-nonprofit hybrid organizing is inherently better than another. Optimizing hybrid organizing and ensuring resilient collaborations may mean allowing collaborative forms to evolve. Practitioners can manage tradeoffs between benefits and costs through an ongoing process of assessing the fit between a given collaborative form, strategic priorities, and relevant features of the operating environment. This dynamic view offers important insights for ensuring the resilience of business-nonprofit collaborative efforts to enhance public health.

Building resilient partnerships: How businesses and nonprofits create the capacity for responsiveness.

Increasingly, businesses are eager to partner with nonprofit organizations to benefit their communities. In spite of good intentions, differences between nonprofit and business organizations can limit the ability of potential partnerships to respond to a changing economic and public health landscape. Using a retrospective, multiple-case study, we sought to investigate the managerial behaviors that enabled businesses and nonprofits to be themselves together in sustainable partnerships. We recruited four nonprofit-business partnerships in the Boston area to serve as cases for our study. Each was designed to address social determinants of health. We thematically analyzed qualitative data from 113 semi-structured interviews, 9 focus groups and 29.5 h of direct observations to identify organizational capacities that build resilient partnerships. Although it is common to emphasize the similarities between partners, we found that it was the acknowledgement of difference that set partnerships up for success. This acknowledgement introduced substantial uncertainty that made managers uncomfortable. Organizations that built the internal capacity to be responsive to, but not control, one another were able to derive value from their unique assets.

Fifty Years of Trust Research in Health Care: A Synthetic Review.

Policy Points First, policymakers can create conditions that will facilitate public trust in health care organizations by making creating and enforcing health policies that make exploitative behavior costly. Second, policymakers can bolster the trustworthiness of health care markets and organizations by using their regulatory authority to address and mitigate harm from conflicts-of-interest and regulatory capture. Third, policymakers and government agencies can further safeguard the public's trust by being transparent and effective about their role in the provision of health services to the public. CONTEXT: Trust plays a critical role in facilitating health care delivery and calls for rebuilding trust in health care are increasingly commonplace. This article serves as a primer on the trust literature for health policymakers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and researchers based on the long history of engagement with the topic among health policy and services researchers. METHODS: We conducted a synthetic review of the health services and health policy literatures on trust since 1970. We organize our findings by trustor-trustee dyads, highlighting areas of convergence, tensions and contradictions, and methodological considerations. We close by commenting on the challenges facing the study of trust in health care, the potential value in borrowing from other disciplines, and imperatives for the future. FINDINGS: We identified 725 articles for review. Most focused on patients' trust in clinicians (n = 499), but others explored clinicians' trust in patients (n = 11), clinicians' trust in clinicians (n = 69), and clinician/patient trust in organizations (n = 19) and systems (n = 127).  Across these five subliteratures, there was lack of consensus about definitions, dimensions, and key attributes of trust. Researchers leaned heavily on cross-sectional survey designs, with limited methodological attention to the relational or contextual realities of trust. Trust has most commonly been treated as an independent variable related to attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. We suggest two challenges have limited progress for the field: (1) conceptual murkiness in terms and theories, and (2) limited observability of the phenomena. Insights from philosophy, sociology, economics, and psychology offer insights for how to advance both the theoretical and empirical study of health-related trust. CONCLUSION: Conceptual clarity and methodological creativity are critical to advancing health-related trust research. Although rigorous research in this area is challenging, the essential role of trust in population health necessitates continued grappling with the topic.

Do Health Care Organizations Have Legitimate Responsibilities beyond the Delivery of Health Care? Insights from Citizenship Theory.

Many health care organizations made public commitments to become antiracist in the wake of George Floyd's murder. These actions raise questions about the appropriateness of health care's engagement in racial justice and social justice movements generally. We argue that health care organizations can be usefully thought of as having two roles: a functional role to care for the sick and a meta-role as an organizational citizen. Fulfilling the role of citizen may require participating in the pursuit of social justice, including efforts to achieve racial equity. The demands of these two roles will need to be balanced, but the role of organizational citizen has been largely ignored and merits serious attention.

Overlooked Potential of Business-Inclusive Networks to Amplify Anchoring Activity Impact.

Mobilizing anchor institutions to promote community health and wellbeing is gaining prominence as an approach to systems change. Anchors are often conceptualized as large, locally rooted, nonprofits that leverage their resources for local benefit. However, existing literature underemphasizes 2 opportunities to enhance the systemic impact of anchoring activity: (1) coordinated action by anchoring networks that include diverse, multi-level stakeholders-a hallmark of health promotion and (2) the potential contributions of the business sector to anchoring networks. Our perspective describes the significance of both for amplifying anchoring impact and identifies critical questions for enabling action.

Memory rehabilitation for people with multiple sclerosis.

BACKGROUND: Problems with cognition, particularly memory, are common in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and can affect their ability to complete daily activities and can negatively affect quality of life. Over the last few years, there has been considerable growth in the number of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of memory rehabilitation in MS. To guide clinicians and researchers, this review provides an overview of the effectiveness of memory rehabilitation for people with MS. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether people with MS who received memory rehabilitation compared to those who received no treatment, or an active control showed better immediate, intermediate, or longer-term outcomes in their: 1. memory functions, 2. other cognitive abilities, and 3. functional abilities, in terms of activities of daily living, mood, and quality of life. SEARCH METHODS: We searched CENTRAL which includes Clinicaltrials.gov, World Health Organization (The Whoqol) International Clinical Trials Registry Portal, Embase and PubMed (MEDLINE), and the following electronic databases (6 September 2020): CINAHL, LILACS, the NIHR Clinical Research Network Portfolio database, The Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, PsycINFO, and CAB Abstracts. SELECTION CRITERIA: We selected RCTs or quasi-RCTs of memory rehabilitation or cognitive rehabilitation for people with MS in which a memory rehabilitation treatment group was compared with a control group. Selection was conducted independently first and then confirmed through group discussion. We excluded studies that included participants whose memory deficits were the result of conditions other than MS, unless we could identify a subgroup of participants with MS with separate results. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Eight review authors were involved in this update in terms of study selection, quality assessment, data extraction and manuscript review. We contacted investigators of primary studies for further information where required. We conducted data analysis and synthesis in accordance with Cochrane methods. We performed a 'best evidence' synthesis based on the methodological quality of the primary studies included. Outcomes were considered separately for 'immediate' (within the first month after completion of intervention), 'intermediate' (one to six months), and 'longer-term' (more than six months) time points. MAIN RESULTS: We added 29 studies during this update, bringing the total to 44 studies, involving 2714 participants. The interventions involved various memory retraining techniques, such as computerised programmes and training on using internal and external memory aids. Control groups varied in format from assessment-only groups, discussion and games, non-specific cognitive retraining, and attention or visuospatial training. The risk of bias amongst the included studies was generally low, but we found eight studies to have high risk of bias related to certain aspects of their methodology. In this abstract, we are only reporting outcomes at the intermediate timepoint (i.e., between one and six months). We found a slight difference between groups for subjective memory (SMD 0.23, 95% CI 0.11 to 0.35; 11 studies; 1045 participants; high-quality evidence) and quality of life (SMD 0.30, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.58; 6 studies; 683 participants; high-quality evidence) favoring the memory rehabilitation group. There was a small difference between groups for verbal memory (SMD 0.25, 95% CI 0.11 to 0.40; 6 studies; 753 participants; low-quality evidence) and information processing (SMD 0.27, 95% CI 0.00 to 0.54; 8 studies; 933 participants; low-quality evidence), favoring the memory rehabilitation group.  We found little to no difference between groups for visual memory (SMD 0.20, 95% CI -0.11 to 0.50; 6 studies; 751 participants; moderate-quality evidence), working memory (SMD 0.16, 95% CI -0.09 to 0.40; 8 studies; 821 participants; moderate-quality evidence), or activities of daily living (SMD 0.06, 95% CI -0.36 to 0.24; 4 studies; 400 participants; high-quality evidence).  AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: There is evidence to support the effectiveness of memory rehabilitation on some outcomes assessed in this review at intermediate follow-up. The evidence suggests that memory rehabilitation results in between-group differences favoring the memory rehabilitation group at the intermediate time point for subjective memory, verbal memory, information processing, and quality of life outcomes, suggesting that memory rehabilitation is beneficial and meaningful to people with MS. There are differential effects of memory rehabilitation based on the quality of the trials, with studies of high risk of bias inflating (positive) outcomes. Further robust, large-scale, multi-centre RCTs, with better quality reporting, using ecologically valid outcome assessments (including health economic outcomes) assessed at longer-term time points are still needed to be certain about the effectiveness of memory rehabilitation in people with MS.

Should a Healthcare System Facilitate Racially Concordant Care for Black Patients?

Addressing racial disparities in health outcomes is an urgent priority for many health care organizations, leading health care managers to explore the potential for organization-level interventions to yield substantive health gains. In recent literature, it is suggested that Black patients who are treated by Black physicians may achieve superior health outcomes in some settings. In this case discussion, we consider a case in which a medical director considers implementing a voluntary program to promote racially concordant care for Black patients. Commentators consider the precedent for such a program, both in current informal care networks and 20th century medical history, as well as the burden such a program may place on Black physicians and the risks of reducing patients' intersectional identities to be solely about race. A subset of commentators suggest that these risks are mitigated by the voluntary nature of the program, whereas others offer caution about relying solely on Black physicians to remedy health disparities. Others view multiple paths as morally defensible but emphasize the need for managers to take proactive steps to communicate and evaluate their choices in the face of such a complex social challenge.

Healthcare lobbying on upstream social determinants of health in the US.

Healthcare stakeholders are increasingly investing to address social determinants of health (SDOH) as they seek to improve health outcomes and reduce total healthcare costs in their communities. Policy heavily shapes SDOH, and healthcare lobbying on SDOH issues may offer large impacts through positive policy change. Federal lobbying disclosures from the ten highest spending health insurance and healthcare provider organizations and related associations between 2015 and 2019 were reviewed to identify lobbying reported on the salient SDOH issues, defined based on the Accountable Health Communities Model health-related social needs screening tool. Five of the organizations reported lobbying on some SDOH issues, including financial strain, employment, food insecurity, and interpersonal safety, but none reported lobbying on other issues, such as non-healthcare-related employment, housing instability, transportation, or education. Lobbying has been a missed opportunity for addressing SDOH. Healthcare organizations have the opportunity to expand their lobbying on upstream SDOH policy issues to increase the impact of their SDOH strategy and further improve population health.

Money Moves the Mare: The Response of Community-Based Organizations to Health Care's Embrace of Social Determinants.

Policy Points Health policies that encourage health and social integration can induce community-based organizations (CBOs) to adopt new ways of working from health care organizations, including their language, staffing patterns, and metrics. These changes can be explained by CBOs' perceptions that health care organizations may provide new sources of revenue. While the welfare implications of these changes are not yet known, policymakers should consider balancing the benefits of professionalizing CBOs against the risks of medicalizing them. CONTEXT: Recent health policies incentivize health care providers to collaborate with community-based organizations (CBOs), such as food pantries and homeless shelters, to address patients' social determinants of health (SDOH). The perspectives of health care leaders on these policy changes have been studied, but the perspectives of CBO managers have not. METHODS: Our research question was: How are CBOs in Massachusetts perceiving and responding to new Medicaid policies that encourage collaboration between health care organizations and CBOs? We interviewed 46 people in leadership positions at CBOs in Massachusetts for approximately an hour each. We analyzed these data abductively, meaning that we iterated between inductively coding transcripts and consulting existing theories and frameworks. FINDINGS: We found evidence of a knowing-doing gap among CBOs. Even though CBOs value their distinctiveness and autonomy from health care, they have undertaken a series of organizational changes in response to the new Medicaid policy that make their organizations appear more like health care organizations. These changes include adopting new performance metrics, hiring clinical staff to the board and senior management positions, and using medical language to describe nonmedical work. Drawing on institutional theory, we suggest that the nonprofits undertake such changes in an effort to demonstrate legitimacy to health care organizations, who may be able to provide new sources of critically needed revenue. CONCLUSIONS: Massachusetts CBOs perceive health systems as potential sources of revenue, due in part to an ongoing Medicaid redesign that encourages the integration of health and social services. This perception is driving CBOs to appear more like health care organizations, but the impacts of these changes on welfare remain unknown.

Massachusetts Community-Based Organization Perspectives on Medicaid Redesign.

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of the study is to investigate how community-based organizations perceive Medicaid policy changes to address the social determinants of health. METHODS: This study included 46 key informant interviews, representing 44 community-based organizations across Massachusetts conducted from September 2017 to March 2018. The interviews were designed to collect community-based organizations' perceptions of Medicaid policy changes. An Advisory Board was empaneled for feedback on data collection and analysis. Massachusetts was chosen as a study site in light of explicit policy efforts to incentivize healthcare organizations to take a more active role in social determinants of health, most notably through the creation of Medicaid Accountable Care Organizations. RESULTS: The community-based organizations expressed optimism about future partnerships with healthcare organizations. This optimism existed alongside the recognition that healthcare organizations and community-based organizations can have conflicting agendas, including misaligned outcomes of interest and timelines. Community-based organizations struggled to define a clear strategy for partnership in the face of incomplete information about how the final Medicaid redesign would proceed and what healthcare providers would be looking for in a partner. CONCLUSIONS: Changes to Medicaid policy can catalyze interest in partnership between healthcare organizations and community-based organizations. To minimize the impact of conflicting agendas, policymakers and healthcare leadership should ensure community-based organizations are part of strategy development and social service program implementation. SUPPLEMENT INFORMATION: This article is part of a supplement entitled Identifying and Intervening on Social Needs in Clinical Settings: Evidence and Evidence Gaps, which is sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Kaiser Permanente, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Challenge of Mutual Disclosure in Global Health Partnerships.

Institutional partnerships in global health, those contractual relationships involving institutions from the Global North and the Global South for purposes of public health enhancement and academic research, often fail to live up to the expectations held by all parties involved. The literature generally argues that inequities are the main concern in global health partnerships. We break with previous analyses by proposing a conceptual model to explain the frequently poor quality of the relationships based on aspects of sameness between the parties, or what we call symmetries in the relationship. We suggest that certain symmetries in positioning, fears and misgivings, and behavior inhibit critical disclosure of relevant information that could improve the effectiveness of the partnership. We propose seven essential elements of building trust in these relationships, and we recommend an incremental approach that treats trust as both a desired outcome and a necessary process that must be developed slowly over time to enhance a partnership's success.

How Do We Fund Flourishing? Maybe Not through Health Care.

The health policy community has a growing interest in the impact of nonmedical determinants of health, such as housing, nutrition, and social supports, on both health outcomes and costs. This interest has been spurred by the Affordable Care Act's emphasis on prevention, Robert Wood Johnson's grant-making focus on a Culture of Health, and an uptick of research demonstrating the potential returns to health care from investments in social services. Much of this policy-making, grant making, and research has focused on older Americans. The direct policy implications of this strategy can be elusive. It has become clear that more than medicine will be necessary to improve older Americans' health status. Real improvement likely requires the development of additional social service offerings, including housing that is accessible to people with disabilities, Meals on Wheels-type nutrition supports, and transportation. But who should bear the costs and control the finances associated with these programs? In this essay, I explore the question of how policy-makers should consider financing nonmedical investments in older Americans' health. As the reader will recognize, I stop short of arguing for what will work. Rather, I identify the strands of an emerging strategy-namely, for health care dollars to be diverted into social service programming-and offer several cautions. It may be that policy-makers still wish to continue down this path, but my hope is that this essay will allow them to so with greater attention to the risks and unintended consequences of that strategy.

Social Determinants As Public Goods: A New Approach To Financing Key Investments In Healthy Communities.

Good research evidence exists to suggest that social determinants of health, including access to housing, nutrition, and transportation, can influence health outcomes and health care use for vulnerable populations. Yet adequate, sustainable financing for interventions that improve social determinants of health has eluded most if not all US communities. This article argues that underinvestment in social determinants of health stems from the fact that such investments are in effect public goods, and thus benefits cannot be efficiently limited to those who pay for them-which makes it more difficult to capture return on investment. Drawing on lesser-known economic models and available data, we show how a properly governed, collaborative approach to financing could enable self-interested health stakeholders to earn a financial return on and sustain their social determinants investments.

A strategic tension for hospitals moving upstream: Cede control but maintain accountability.

Health systems are focusing attention on the role that social determinants of health (SDOH) can and should play in health care delivery. This is especially true among accountable care organizations (ACOs) and Medicaid ACOs in particular. In crafting SDOH strategies, senior leadership teams may face an organizational tension in aiming to cede control over dollars, data and patient experience to community-based organizations (CBOs) while also maintaining financial accountability for health outcomes. We review the history of neighborhood health centers (NHCs) in order to foreshadow the types of critiques ACOs are likely to face in working with CBOs. We conclude by suggesting a several strategies by which ACOs may be lessen accountability concerns, including raising the issue with regulators, using low-risk dollars to fund joint-work, working through an intermediary, providing technical assistance and viewing the relationship as a partnership rather than contract.

Spending on social and public health services and its association with homicide in the USA: an ecological study.

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether state-level spending on social and public health services is associated with lower rates of homicide in the USA. DESIGN: Ecological study. SETTING: USA. PARTICIPANTS: All states in the USA and the District of Columbia for which data were available (n=42). PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: Homicide rates for each state were abstracted from the US Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting. RESULTS: After adjusting for potential confounding variables, we found that every $10 000 increase in spending per person living in poverty was associated with 0.87 fewer homicides per 100 000 population or approximately a 16% decrease in the average homicide rate (estimate=-0.87, SE=0.15, p<0.001). Furthermore, there was no significant effect in the quartile of states with the highest percentages of individuals living in poverty but significant effects in the quartiles of states with lower percentages of individuals living in poverty. CONCLUSIONS: Based on our findings, spending on social and public health services is associated with significantly lower homicide rates at the state level. Although we cannot infer causality from this research, such spending may provide promising avenues for homicide reduction in the USA, particularly among states with lower levels of poverty.

Geospatial analysis of emergency department visits for targeting community-based responses to the opioid epidemic.

The opioid epidemic in the United States carries significant morbidity and mortality and requires a coordinated response among emergency providers, outpatient providers, public health departments, and communities. Anecdotally, providers across the spectrum of care at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA have noticed that Charlestown, a community in northeast Boston, has been particularly impacted by the opioid epidemic and needs both emergency and longer-term resources. We hypothesized that geospatial analysis of the home addresses of patients presenting to the MGH emergency department (ED) with opioid-related emergencies might identify "hot spots" of opioid-related healthcare needs within Charlestown that could then be targeted for further investigation and resource deployment. Here, we present a geospatial analysis at the United States census tract level of the home addresses of all patients who presented to the MGH ED for opioid-related emergency visits between 7/1/2012 and 6/30/2015, including 191 visits from 100 addresses in Charlestown, MA. Among the six census tracts that comprise Charlestown, we find a 9.5-fold difference in opioid-related ED visits, with 45% of all opioid-related visits from Charlestown originating in tract 040401. The signal from this census tract remains strong after adjusting for population differences between census tracts, and while this tract is one of the higher utilizing census tracts in Charlestown of the MGH ED for all cause visits, it also has a 2.9-fold higher rate of opioid-related visits than the remainder of Charlestown. Identifying this hot spot of opioid-related emergency needs within Charlestown may help re-distribute existing resources efficiently, empower community and ED-based physicians to advocate for their patients, and serve as a catalyst for partnerships between MGH and local community groups. More broadly, this analysis demonstrates that EDs can use geospatial analysis to address the emergency and longer-term health needs of the communities they are designed to serve.