HIP-Cuyahoga’s Efforts to Bridge Clinical Medicine and Public Health Highlighted in AMCNO Article

The November/December 2018 issue of the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland and Northern Ohio’s (AMCNO) Northern Ohio Physician profiles HIP-Cuyahoga’s efforts to bridge clinical medicine and public health on page 11. Co-written by Dr. Heidi Gullett, HIP-Cuyahoga Co-chair, and Kirstin Craciun, director of community outreach at The Center for Health Affairs and HIP-Cuyahoga Steering Committee member, the article profiles efforts over the past five years to more closely align the community health assessments that public health partners and hospitals complete.
Building on the past five years of collaboration guided by HIP-Cuyahoga, The Center for Health Affairs, and the CWRU School of Medicine, the collaborative is poised to complete a community health assessment in 2019 that includes the Cleveland Department of Public Health, Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and multiple local hospital partners. This is a significant step in the right direction to more closely link clinical medicine and public health in community health improvement efforts. A major strength of conducting the assessment and community health improvement planning process collaboratively is the potential to address complex structural determinants of health, which have previously proven intractable, but which impact both individuals and organizations through preventable differences in health outcomes.