Public Health Solutions’ Symposium Series “Integrating Human Services and Clinical Services with Clients at the Center” brings together the most important stakeholders who individually work along the continuum of care to address the systemic inequities that prevent members of New York City community from accessing good health.
The symposium series features leaders from various sectors who will address the greatest challenges in coordinated health and human services delivery, and best practices and strategies to more effectively address the needed policy changes, technology advancements, and funding requirements. The goal of this Symposium series is to inform the design of a roadmap, including core components of a client-centered infrastructure, to effectively address social determinants of health towards achieving health equity in New York City.
In our first session of the Symposium Series, we identified the key challenges that lie in our path towards creating such a system of care: the lack of closed loop referrals, a fragmented and siloed care system that prevents the exchange of data and information, and issues around data collection, comprehensiveness and actionability.
The second session of the series focused on solutions that are in action – three innovative local and city level models that have integrated healthcare and social services to positively affect social determinants of health in their communities – and draw out successes and challenges from each of these models, and ways in which these learnings will help build a strong framework for New York City. The models we focused on were Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, 2-1-1 San Diego and Pathways Community Hub Institute.
The third and final session of the series recapped the discussions from the previous two sessions along with outcomes from four expert workgroups PHS hosted in September 2021, which helped identify four key actions that will serve as the building blocks for the roadmap for improved health outcomes for New Yorkers. The session also included five breakout sessions that were sector-specific deep dives into implementation strategies for each of the four key actions.