Working in collaboration--across boundaries and disciplines--is a hallmark of the CHI Center's work. Here we highlight just a few of our cross-cutting initiatives.
The Larry A. Green Center for the Advancement of Primary Health Care for the Public Good
The Green Center is a partnership between the CHI Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, and multiple partners to advance understanding of the generalist role in healthcare and primary health care as a common good.
Population Cancer Analytics Shared Resource
Population Cancer Analytics Shared Resource is a core facility of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. The Shared Resource provides cancer investigators with relevant data sources and expertise in large database analytics to address research questions pertaining to cancer risk, health services use, equity, and outcome assessment across clinical, socio-demographic, and geographic subgroups of the population.
Health Improvement Partnership (HIP)-Cuyahoga
The Health Improvement Partnership for Cuyahoga County, HIP-Cuyahoga, is an ongoing community health improvement plan bringing together all local health care systems and public health departments, hundreds of social service agencies and thousands of individuals to advance community health and equity.
Current priorities, identified and implemented in a highly participatory process, are: the cross-cutting issues of eliminating structural racism and building trust and trustworthiness, and the topics of reducing the impact of chronic disease, improving community conditions of violence, safety, poverty, and transportation, and improving mental health and reducing addiction and suicide.
Computational Models
The CHI Center is engaged in a wide variety of simulation modeling to understand complex problems in health and health care and to identify and foster action on multilevel leverage points for helpful intervention. Much of this work uses Community-Based System Dynamics and takes a participatory group model building approach that brings together on-the-ground wisdom of partners with insights from data.
Examples of CHI Center models include an early agent-based model of the paradox of primary care, a recent model of primary care in Singapore, COVID-19 predictive models that provided important guidance early in the pandemic, and three Cross-Sector Innovation Initiative models: Systems Change for Racial Equity (SCORE) Model, Community Health Worker Model, and a Racial Trauma, Healing and Perspective Transformation Model.
Wisdom of Practice Initiative
The Wisdom of Practice Initiative, supported by the University Suburban Health Center Foundation, aims to bring to light the value and values of the personal physician, and the effects of private practice and health care system practice context on the ability to meet patient needs for personalized, integrated care. The Initiative has four components:
- An ethnography of practice by community-based physicians
- A series of oral histories of practicing physicians
- A study of medical students’ views of the future of health care and their place in that future
- An annual endowed lectureship
Bridges Out of Poverty
A series of projects based on the Bridges Out of Poverty framework engage participants in transformative Getting Ahead workshops and evaluate the effects on health, preventive activities, resources, hope, stress level, future orientation, and life trajectory.