The greatest enemy to this work is the
status quo. Health care is incredibly
good at protecting its own inertia.
"What you're in now is our neonatal intensive care unit."
Martin Luther King has this
line in the letter from Birmingham jail
where he says, 'In our generation we will
repent not for the vitriolic acts and
words of the bad people, but for the
appalling silence of the good people.'
And that's the challenge in health care right now.
How do we break the silence
around what our health care system has
become? And recognize what it was always
meant to be which was about delivering
health for patients across the country.
"Hi, how are you? "Good, how are you?" One of the
powerful things is that doctors for the
most part truly know what their patients
need, but we've just designed a
healthcare delivery system that is not
built to recognize what is known and
understood to drive health outcomes.
"Can you give you a nice deep breath in and out through your mouth?"
So, it's well documented
that just ten percent of health outcomes
are attributable to clinical care, but
almost seventy percent are tied to social
and environmental factors and the
behaviors that are associated with them
essentially everything that happens in a
patient's life outside the four walls of
the clinic. When we think about asthma,
for example, so many patients struggle
with asthma because they're living with
12 other people in a dilapidated
brownstone with asbestos and mildew and
and you know, that's just not the
conversation we have in the healthcare
system. We have a conversation around
"Use your inhale" or "Taking your controller medication."
But the truth is that until
that family actually finds different
housing, that kid's going to be an asthmatic
"Some of what keeps us healthy
is going to the doctor, right?" "Right" "And we
get our medications and they have a
bunch of specialists that they're seeing
but most of what makes us healthy
happens in our house or in our neighborhood, right,
like what foods are we eating, do we have transportation?
"My neighborhood grocery's horrible"
"Your neighborhood grocery store is horrible?"
"Yes."
"Tell me about that."
"It's horrible."
Health Leads vision is about health care system
that addresses all patients basic
resource needs as a standard part of
quality care
"So did you need any furniture or
household appliances, anything like that?"
"Or is it just mainly clothes and diapers?"
The health systems that we work with,
the goal is that every time a patient comes
in to the doctor, they're asked about
food and housing and heat the same way
they are any other clinical vital signs
you know blood pressure, height, weight, is
there enough food at home, that's how you
make good clinical decisions.
We now work with hundreds of health
systems across the country, arming
community health workers and care
managers with the tools that they need
in order to be able to connect patients
with resources at scale and really begin
to change health outcomes for the
patient population within that whole system.
We don't limit ourselves to what happens
inside of the four walls of Kaiser
Permanente, we look at the total
community and ecosystem around them
we're catching things upstream as
opposed to waiting until you show up in
my ER or in my doctor's office that, by
then, we're trying to recover you to go
back to the healthy life. "Yeah."
Our work is to repurpose the assets of
healthcare: data, technology, workforces,
infrastructure, through the lens of
health, rather than disease.