A SSM Health foundation will use a $10 million donation from one of the health system's board members to launch a fund for addressing social determinants of health of vulnerable patients.
SSM Health Foundation - St. Louis will create the SSM Health - St. Louis Community Health Impact Fund with Carolyn Kindle's philanthropic gift. SSM Health and its foundation will use the fund to partner with organizations that address socioeconomic needs, including housing, food and transportation in the city where the system is based.
Kindle is CEO and an owner of St. Louis' professional soccer team, St. Louis CITY SC. She also is president of Enterprise Mobility Foundation, a charity that supports the work of nonprofits nationwide.
In a press release on the new fund, Dr. Alex Garza, SSM Health chief community health officer, said that medical care alone is insufficient to help patients who have significant social barriers become healthy. He explained that the new fund "helps us build the ability to try and address the sometimes-immense needs of patients who, although (they) recover clinically, will struggle to stabilize once they leave our care."
Jeremy Fotheringham, regional president of SSM Health's St. Louis and Southern Illinois markets, said in the release that Kindle's gift "provides us with the opportunity to greatly increase our health ministry's ability to extend our mission into the communities who need it most."
Kindle said in the release that the fund "represents an investment in the long-term health and vitality of our community."
Optimization, expansion
Garza said in an interview that SSM Health has developed the framework for the new fund and is building out the programming. He said the key principle is that the fund will bolster the efforts of organizations that support patients who have acute socioeconomic needs.
The money from SSM Health will help those partners optimize and expand their efforts, Garza said, noting that nonprofit organizations like these often are cash-strapped.
SSM Health will determine which organizations to support using insights from community health needs assessments and related performance indicators and goals.
Three pillars
Garza noted that the fund's framework is focused on three pillars: impacting patients, impacting community and impacting the health system.
He said that through contractual partnerships with community-based organizations with expertise in addressing the social determinants of health, SSM Health will secure direct services for identified patients.
At the same time, SSM Health will work collaboratively with the partner organizations to help build their capacity to serve the broader community.
A focus of the partnerships will be demonstrating the direct impact of the partnerships on clinical outcomes and the cost savings for the health system as a whole.
Promoting better outcomes
Garza said SSM Health will focus on organizations and initiatives that advance clinical goals of SSM Health patients.
The system already has identified two initiatives that will receive Community Health Impact Fund dollars, and it expects to add more.
Through its existing Bread Basket Program, SSM Health partners with the St. Louis Area Foodbank to provide healthy food to patients in need. The program served 3,276 patients last year. Dollars from the Community Health Impact Fund will boost that program and help connect it more directly with clinical goals of patients. For instance, Garza said, SSM Health and its partners are exploring how they might address patients' food insecurity while also correlating the response with specific clinical outcomes. This could be accomplished by offering patients medically tailored meals.
The other initiative that will receive funding is medical respite. SSM Health plans to work with community organizations including Haven Recovery Homes and LIV Sober Living to establish more formal relationships to provide medical respite for discharged patients in need of housing while they heal. The partnering organizations already offer support to address socioeconomic needs. This includes nutrition, transportation, case management, peer support and housing navigation. The partnership with SSM Health will secure placements for identified patients. The partnership also will bolster the organizations' ongoing efforts to increase their reach to the broader community.
Garza said the impact fund will help ensure these programs are more tightly aligned with clinical outcomes and with what is important to SSM Health and to the community.
He added that the partner organizations that the health system is supporting "already are ingrained in the community, and now with SSM Health's support, we can help ensure they can do their work even better."