More Hospital Systems Embracing Anchor Role

Healthcare Anchor Network’s David Zuckerman and Atrium Health’s Kinneil Coltman describe ways health systems are advocating for changes in policy on housing, transportation and food insecurity. During a recent webinar, David Zuckerman, president and founder of the Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN), gave several examples of ways that health systems are using their roles as large employers to make community investments and partner with other community groups to advocate for changes in policy on housing, transportation and food insecurity. The health system members of HAN embrace their roles as catalysts for health, economic, and racial equity by leveraging their everyday operations, including hiring, purchasing, and investment for equitable, local economic impact and to build community wealth. “Our focus has been how to consistently change your institutional behaviors, but one of the things we learned early on was that there was also a need to help health systems be more effective advocates around a broader vision of health equity,” Zuckerman said.

Trinity Health worked in coalition with community partners to advocate for the Cares Act funds for rental and utility assistance in Idaho. “It's really important that they brought their voice to a broad coalition to help create the enactment of the Idaho Fair Warning Act, which gives tenants notice before eviction.” In the other example, UMass Memorial Health in Worcester was part of a coalition to help allocate ARPA funding for housing, including the first affordable housing trust fund in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. “I think that this is a really important shift that we're seeing around these organizations being involved in other areas of social determinants of health policy that are so critical to helping us achieve health equity in this country,” he said. As the largest employer in North Carolina, Atrium Health is rethinking its social impact on the community. Atrium had been building a lot of infrastructure around health equity for a long time, Coltman said, “so when COVID started to roll into our communities, we had seen some of the headlines pouring in from other parts of the country about the profound and dramatic disparities along racial and socio-economic lines related to COVID, and we did not want to see that happen.”