Photo: Fritz Bielmeier on Unsplash

Addressing community health and well-being through urban services

06 December 2021

By Anil Menon, Executive Vice President of Community and Urban Services at Sharecare

If there’s a lesson city leaders should draw from the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be the importance of building long-term community resilience – and of doing so through cross-sector initiatives.

Tackling health and well-being at a macro level is no easy task and demands the attention of city leader-led coalitions – consisting of local healthcare providers, publicly- or privately-funded health insurers, private-sector employers, and individual residents – because of the stakes and complexity involved.

Anil Menon, Sharecare

To be sure, individual organisations can make great progress on their own, whether they’re working with patients, members, or employees. However, making sweeping change to overcome our broader culture of “sick care” requires shifts at the level of the communities where we live – not just in the individual sectors influencing different parts of consumers’ health. This culture shift ignites when well-being coalitions aim their efforts at transforming not just individual well-being, but community well-being, which includes the social determinants of health (SDOH) that can shape up to 80 percent of health outcomes.

The key to powering these transformations is urban services, a human-centric approach to developing thriving populations in sustainable communities. Rather than starting from the premise that new infrastructure or technology is inherently good or bad for cities, urban services focus on holistic resident well-being as their primary goal. Efforts to help people flourish in all areas of their lives – across their individual health and social determinant circumstances – can and should incorporate infrastructure and technology where appropriate but should not treat them as ends in themselves.

To date, well-being-first efforts led by Sharecare have demonstrated the potential of cross-sector initiatives to transform the way people live their lives. Based on these interventions and related research we’ve conducted, Sharecare has seen how community health efforts must honour the wishes and lived experience of local leaders and residents, bridge gaps between stakeholders, establish clear business value, derive solutions from best-in-class research, and appropriately integrate technology in service of community goals.

Resilience

To enable physical, mental, and fiscal resilience in the cities of today and tomorrow, city leaders should apply the following tenets in their work with urban services-oriented coalitions:

  • Take a bottom-up approach – Successful cross-sector initiatives are community-driven at the grassroots. The most successful of these initiatives will be championed by city leaders in partnership with local companies, healthcare organisations, and residents. Private-sector employers can contribute to these efforts by focusing on the communities where they operate as places their employees live, in recognition of the fact that shifting workplace expectations see people spending less time sitting at a traditional office desk. Interventions should reflect local values and experiences but should also incorporate best practices from national and global success stories.
  • Implement evidence-based design – Data-driven, research-backed solutions improve community well-being and can be key to building coalition buy-in. Employer reluctance to participate in community well-being transformation efforts is often rooted in insufficient clarity about the return on investment. Traditionally, environmental, social, and governance efforts have struggled to define clear and measurable outcomes because of a lack of high-quality data, particularly related to social concerns. Near real-time measurement of the social determinants and health equity circumstances that define employees’ lives, as captured through tools like Sharecare’s Community Well-Being Index, can better surface opportunities for coalitions to drive clear and specific societal value and overcome any doubts employers may have. As an example, a recent blog post from the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health explains how research and analysis conducted by Sharecare identified opportunities for American Eagle Outfitters to address SDOH gaps based on the community well-being of the areas where many of its distribution centre employees lived.

Detailed views of the built environment can also complement data collected by health systems and health insurers on their patients and members, helping them to make more informed decisions and to satisfy their community health mandates.

  • Future-proof backward – City leaders should take responsibility for addressing the root causes of community health challenges to create long-term resilience. One way technology can appropriately support urban services efforts is through the use of “digital twins”. Just as these app-based tools can improve an individual’s decision-making in their own healthcare, they can sharpen how we think about the future of a community, prompting questions such as: “What will the community look like if it continues on the current trajectory of health and well-being?” and “What is the future impact of current decisions, including a lack of proactive investments and interventions?”
  • Use technology appropriately – Community-driven platforms should be leveraged to meet the unique needs of diverse communities. One of the biggest weaknesses of smart cities initiatives over the past decade has been the technology-centricity of their solutions and approaches. Rather than starting from technology and working backward, city leaders should start by putting the community and its residents at the centre of any initiative and then incorporate insights from tools — such as Sharecare’s Index — as a performance measure for assessing the effectiveness of digitisation efforts.
  • Develop a sustainable business model – Most community transformation efforts, while well-intentioned, suffer from an unsustainable, philanthropy-driven business model and often get stuck in “pilot purgatories.” However, outcomes-based funding would ensure sustainability beyond the catalyst investment. We need new impact models that treat community investments as endogenous variables – dependent on a complex interplay of factors – rather than the traditional approach of looking at health-related investments as exogenous inputs that can be plugged into economic growth or investment models. This will require city leaders to develop new and non-traditional partnerships and ecosystems to deploy community transformation solutions. In fact, for this reason, Sharecare has partnered with digital infrastructure investment firm Digital Alpha to create new business models and funding for communities seeking to transform their health outcomes.

Based on the events of 2020 and 2021, increasing numbers of leaders have recognised that a resilient, go-forward response model must transcend the limited scope of addressing illness and transition our discussion and dollars to preventive measures that focus on healthy people who thrive in sustainable environments.

As a city leader, what will be your next step?

Anil Menon is executive vice president of community and urban services at Sharecare (Nasdaq: SCHR), a digital health company that helps providers, employers, health plans, government organisations, and communities optimise individual and population-wide well-being by driving positive behaviour change. Previously, he served as managing director of the World Economic Forum and as global president of Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities division.  

 

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Image: Fritz Bielmeier on Unsplash

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