The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has created a coalition of hundreds of people and organizations — including America’s Essential Hospitals — for its 100 Million Healthier Lives (100 MHL) campaign, a large-scale initiative to improve the lives of 100 million people by 2020.
The global effort relies on coalition building, community organizing, and measured outcomes. IHI began building the coalition at a conference in 2014; all members are committed to improving population health and transforming health care systems to better address social determinants and well-being.
The overall campaign acknowledges that patients’ environment and social factors — not just health care access — play a large role in determining health outcomes. It focuses on improving health equity by contextualizing each community and unpacking the various causes of negative health outcomes. The campaign looks to individual communities to create interventions and programs that specifically address the complexities and issues they experience.
America’s Essential Hospitals shares the goals and values of the initiative, and we work to identify programs and share information that can best help members care not only for their patients, but also for their communities. America’s Essential Hospitals in 2016 built a population health road map to guide hospitals and health systems toward population health improvement activities, addressing social determinants and social risk factors both inside and outside of hospital walls.
IHI’s campaign offers many resources to help communities assess progress and measure the effects of their programs and interventions, including:
- Metrics for Healthy Communities, a tool that provides logic models and metrics for various community development or public health activities;
- the 100 MHL map gallery, which allows users to search and analyze density maps and data created by other users; and
- the Community Tool Box, which provides a variety of toolkits with step-by-step guides for completing population health activities.
In addition to these tools, IHI’s campaign offers an online toolkit for developing and conducting community health needs assessments (CHNAs). This toolkit provides the necessary framework and data collection tools to conduct a CHNA. Users can then upload their collected data onto a collaborative map and share it with others.
