Welcome to the first Center for Community Health integration (CHI Center) newsletter. The newsletter is designed to share timely information and encourage further interactions among academic and community partners. We welcome all readers interested in equity-focused work around community health and integrated, personalized care. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues.
Most entities are organized vertically ― providing goods and services in a narrow focus. The CHI Center tries to serve as a force for horizontal integration ― working across organizations and sectors to take on complex problems in health and equity. We are grateful for the many people who are bringing their expertise and relationships to these efforts, and we look to support others’ work toward the collective good.
This issue of the newsletter introduces faculty member Peter Hovmand. Since arriving in Cleveland in July 2020, Peter already is having a transformative effect on the region’s collaborative, interdisciplinary environment through his teaching and application of Community-Based System Dynamics to bring people together to tackle complex community problems.
The profile of policy leader Greg Brown gives a hint of his outsized impact in making those around him better and in making our community a fairer and more hopeful place to be.
And an overview of a collaborative predictive modeling initiative provides links to an ongoing effort to give us the information we need to make decisions in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.
We look forward to working to make the shakeups of the pandemic an opportunity to come together in new ways to solve problems in health, equity, and a fragmented health system and society.
- Kurt Stange