Our Approach

photo of colorful push pins connected by lines

The Center for Community Health Integration (CHI) conducts collaborative research and development to advance community health and integrated, personalized health care. We invest in relationships, analytical capacity, and novel ideas. Working with colleagues across multiple levels of a complex system, we are developing a shared understanding of the effects of social, environmental, and human systems, and using that understanding to improve the health of individuals, vulnerable populations, and communities.

 
Experience and Expertise

The CHI Center brings experience and expertise in:

  • Systems science, Community-Based System Dynamics, and computational modeling
  • Integrated qualitative, quantitative, and community participatory methods
  • Public health, epidemiology, clinical family medicine, and social marketing
  • Bioethics, history of medicine, and business
  • Boundary spanning, generalism, implementation science
  • Transdisciplinary systems science education

How We Work

How we work is as important as what we work on. Guided by the wisdom of the community, our interdisciplinary team aims to build trust, be trustworthy, and interact with humility. Our work is grounded in an understanding of equity and a belief in working across traditional boundaries. In a world of entities organized vertically around specific services and product lines, the CHI Center aims to be a force for horizontal integration, bringing together individuals, organizations, and initiatives.

What We Work On

The Center’s current and planned multilevel research and action addresses:

  • Inequity, poverty, and a fragmented community
  • Attending to the interaction of social structures, behavior, environment, and biology
  • Understanding, assessing, and improving the generalist approach and primary health care
  • Integrating and personalizing care for people living with multiple chronic conditions 
  • Fostering safe environments for vulnerable populations, healers and those training to be healers
  • Teaching and developing a learning community in the science of systems change for health and equity
  • Promoting an effective interface between health care and public health systems
  • Implementation science