The Partner Role

Engage with Individuals and Organizations in the Community, Prioritizing Those Most Affected by Inequities

Raising the Bar’s five principles provide the foundation for transformational action by healthcare payers, providers, and other organizations. This section focuses on healthcare’s role as a PARTNER, including the essential role payers and other organizations play in facilitating the provision of healthcare, and outlines concrete actions, each with a commitment that healthcare can make to advance equity and excellence, and a set of tactical strategies.

Concrete Actions for the Partner

Communities thrive—and healthcare delivery is more effective—when healthcare meaningfully involves communities; respects and centers their expertise, needs, and priorities in governance and decision-making; and works in partnership with individuals and organizations in the community on activities and initiatives that reflect that engagement and their role as a partner.

Action 1: Meaningfully involve individuals from the community in governance and decision-making

  • Meaningfully involve community members, reflecting the diversity of the community, in governance and at all levels of decision-making regarding strategies, policies, and practices.
  • Provide support for community members’ effective engagement, including compensation for time and expertise and the removal of language, transportation, and other barriers to their full participation.

Action 2: Build trusting relationships with individuals and organizations in the community

  • Integrate respect for community expertise into organizational culture and make long-term investments in relationships with community organizations and residents.
  • Develop an understanding of how to effectively partner with communities and build the internal capacity to facilitate those partnerships.
  • Create systems and processes that ensure accountability for steps needed to provide for a community engagement strategy and community-focused initiatives.
  • Collaborate regularly with local leaders to understand their work, explore opportunities for collective impact, and determine the most appropriate role for healthcare.
  • Meet with residents to understand how the community defines its own needs, assets, and priorities, and co-design initiatives to address health priorities.
  • Create opportunities for community leaders to present to leadership within the healthcare organization or institution.
  • Acknowledge the lack of equity in both society and the healthcare system, healthcare’s role in perpetuating inequities, and the importance of proactive steps to eliminate racism and all discrimination in healthcare.

Action 3: Respect and build on the expertise and power of individuals and organizations in the community.

  • Elevate the role of individuals and advocates, facilitating a move from low engagement or consultation to partnership and community leadership as a means of effective engagement.
  • Open doors for and support development of community leaders and seek opportunities where community leaders and organizations can gain greater visibility and access to others who influence decision-making.
  • Create opportunities for community partners to lead and receive recognition.
  • Establish a balance of decision-making power in partnerships and ensure that community partners have real decision-making roles including on the use of funding.
  • Work in solidarity with community members to address their self-identified needs, interests, and priorities.
  • Rethink the traditional community health assessment approach and engage with public health partners, other institutions, and community stakeholders to more rigorously obtain input and identify opportunities for collective action.
  • Understand the existing initiatives in the community and contribute to those efforts instead of creating new initiatives.
  • Pursue collaborative partnerships with public health agencies, building on their experience in community-wide health initiatives, surveillance, and policy.
  • Invest in further development of community organizations or provide resources to build them where they do not exist.
  • Share knowledge and support the capacity of community organizations and individuals to succeed independent of the direct benefit to healthcare

Raising the Bar for Maternal Health: The Partner Role

To achieve maternal health equity, healthcare institutions must engage with individuals and organizations in the community to achieve maternal health equity.

What does this look like? Hospitals, health systems, independent women’s health and multi-specialty provider groups, and FQHCs:

  • Recognize achieving optimal maternal health in the communities most affected by the maternal health crisis requires healthcare institutions to partner with the communities they serve.
  • Build trusting relationships with the community to improve maternal health.
  • Respect and build on the expertise and power of individuals and organizations in the community to advance optimal maternal health.

Get started with the newly released Raising the Bar for Maternal Health Equity and Excellence guidance.

Watch: Advancing Equity in Healthcare Systems

Featuring leaders from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Essex, Hudson & Union Counties, Jersey City Medical Center, and ChangeLab Solutions.

The Partner Role in Practice

The following set of vignettes highlight examples of organizations already advancing efforts in line with those actions outlined in the PARTNER role.

HOPE Clinic

Strong community partnerships provide the strength to improve the well-being of a multi-cultural community. HOPE Clinic, a large Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in the Greater Houston area, has centered community partnerships in its work since 2002 when it started out as a volunteer-run organization. HOPE Clinic begins by finding others in the community that share an idea or vision for change that is informed by provider observations and community-identified priorities. Particularly when building programs that will have
long-term, community-wide impact, HOPE Clinic seeks partnerships that will address upstream contributors to
health issues and expand capacity to provide culturally appropriate services.

Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit academic medical center. To better meet the needs of its varied patient communities, especially those most affected by inequities, Cleveland Clinic partners with community residents and organizations. At the beginning of COVID, the faith community in Cleveland struggled with whether it could hold socially distanced services safely. Seeing their patients wrestle with this, Cleveland Clinic partnered with leaders in the
faith community to create a forum where clinical experts, counselors, therapists, and community members could come together to discuss the latest information on the virus, and strategies for safely socially distancing without emotionally distancing. The small program grew quickly and helped congregations across 12 states develop strategies to meet their congregations’ needs during the pandemic

Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Nationwide Children’s Hospital is an acute care teaching pediatric hospital that sees over 1.5 million patients each year. While the hospital serves families from across the nation and the globe, many of their patients come
from their surrounding neighborhood in the South Side of Columbus, Ohio. Though culturally rich and racially diverse, the South Side has faced a long history of disenfranchisement.

Recognizing the toll that poor housing was taking on the health of its community members, Nationwide Children’s
Hospital partnered with Community Development for All People (CD4AP), a local faith-based community development organization that had been providing safe and affordable housing for South Side residents for several years. Together, they created the Healthy Neighborhoods, Healthy Families Realty Collaborative, which is owned by CD4AP and housed within Nationwide Children’s Hospital. During the first few years of their joint venture, they rehabilitated and repaired homes within a 38-block area to the immediate south and east of the Hospital’s main campus. The number of vacant properties has since declined by over 90 percent and their partnership has
continued to grow.