Keep Us Thriving: Five Principles for Advancing Health Equity
Welcome to our new community-focused blog series, called “Keep Us.” Each month, we will focus on a new theme aimed at our collective effort and impact to keep us all connected to care and living our best lives with health, security, and dignity.
At Unite Us, we believe that gathering social care data at scale can meaningfully contribute to advancing health equity, and that analyzing the relationship between health and social care data can lead to valuable insights about how to improve overall health.
Solving for Gaps in Health Equity
Our experience in driving coordination of care, reimbursement of community-based services, social care data analytics, and community-wide interoperability, is rooted in community-engaged practices. This puts us in a unique position to play a role in reducing health disparities and advancing health equity through a hyper-local approach, yet with the ability to deliver at scale.
In a new white paper, we outline five principles of practice that are critical to advancing health equity using SDOH data:
1. Ensure communities and individuals most impacted have power to make decisions
2. Leverage the power of referral data to improve access to social care
3. Measure and evaluate data
4. Remove barriers to data sharing
5. Use data to drive action
Connecting the Dots in Chicago
In Chicago’s North Lawndale community, health systems and community-based organizations are working together with Unite Us to advance health equity in their neighborhood. This is one example of many where local communities are coming together to truly impact change.
“Being able to collectively come around and look at social determinants of health as a city and as a county, together, is something that’s really inspiring. We look forward to creating models of success for how we can better serve our communities and increase equity in access.”
–Erin Dowland, Chief Development Officer, CEDA
Advance Health Equity through Partnership
Our mission is to connect health and social care. We understand that determinants of health and health disparities are mostly behavioral, social, and economic. As the only end-to-end solution for addressing SDoH, we are uniquely positioned to be a partner in solutions that equitably improve the health of communities. With our mission rooted in community capacity building, we’ve formed partnerships with a diverse range of stakeholders—including community-based organizations, health plans, health systems, hospitals, and government entities.
“A platform like Unite Us helps Sinai achieve its mission and vision. We’re not just a hospital, we’re a health system. This is a unique opportunity for us to do what we have always wanted to do—which is to connect the dots.”
–Debra Wesley, President, Sinai Community Institute
We work hard to build infrastructure that offers the size and scale necessary to address the magnitude of the challenge, and ultimately advance health equity. We look forward to continuing this work alongside industry partners and the individuals we collectively strive to serve.
Help connect the dots in your community:
About Unite Us
Unite Us is the nation’s leading software company bringing sectors together to improve the health and well-being of communities. We drive the collaboration to identify, deliver, and pay for services that impact whole-person health. Through Unite Us’ national network and software, community-based organizations, government agencies, and healthcare organizations are all connected to better collaborate to meet the needs of the individuals in their communities.
