Talk and Conversation with Dr. Anthony Iton: Stories, Lessons, and Tinder for Change

Many of you attended the June 19 “Community Leadership on Community Health” round table at the Pacific Club that included federal, state, and county agencies, the governor and mayors’ offices, hospitals, foundations, and other stakeholders. During this gathering, we: 1) learned about each other’s work related to community health, 2) explored overlaps, needs, and opportunities, and 3) selected behavioral health and homelessness as the top community health areas to address. The consensus was to create community work groups to comprehensively and collaboratively address these priorities.

For those who are new to this collaborative, here’s a brief background:

• Under the Affordable Care Act, non-profit hospitals must conduct Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs), identify top community health areas to address, and submit implementation strategies to improve these indicators to the IRS every three years.
• The Healthcare Association of Hawaii (HAH) led local hospitals in an innovative partnership with the State Department of Health (DOH) to conduct the 2013 Hawaii Hospitals Community Health Needs Assessment, which produced one statewide and four county reports.
• As an outgrowth of the CHNA initiative, HAH partnered with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) and DOH to co-host a series of eight “Building Bridges to Better Health” forums across three islands to nurture networking and discussion around the community health priorities identified by local hospitals (June-November 2 013).
• In June 2014, we co-hosted the “Community Leadership on Community Health” round table to formally bring together leaders from federal and local agencies and organizations to explore community health overlaps and identify shared priorities.

And that brings us to where we are today: We are excited to invite you to kick-start the two community health work groups by first meeting with Anthony Iton, M.D., J.D., MPH, Senior Vice President for Healthy Communities at The California Endowment on October 2.

Dr. Iton will share success stories of community health collaborations, lessons learned, and ways to achieve large-scale change through collective impact. The goals of this gathering are to network, ignite ideas and collaborations for local application, and build towards the first work group meetings in December [dates TBA].

We hope you can come, meet others, and be inspired!