Category: Digging Deeper

The Accountable Health Communities (AHC) Model was a 5-year Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center project (running May 2017 to April 2022) that tested whether systematically identifying and addressing the health-related social needs of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries’ has an impact on healthcare utilization.

The Sustainable Food Center took a team approach to applying it to their work—pulling in staff from community engagement, policy, food access, and evaluation. Their resulting report provides a comprehensive look at the practical and emotional choices and navigation points that people experience in meeting basic food needs.

Aetna and EHF joined forces to explore food security using the Positive Deviance Approach, which uses solution discovery to address complex social challenges. Instead of asking, “Where is food insecurity the worst and how do we fix it?”, solution discovery asks, “Are there people who consistently have healthy food even though they’re living in the same circumstances where others do not?”

In partnership with Harvard School of Public Health, EHF conducted a longitudinal analysis of the opinions and views of Texans. Longitudinal analyses are important when looking beyond a single moment of time and enable us to recognize opinion shifts or salient concerns over time.

High-quality primary care is essential to building and sustaining a healthy population. As a foundational component for healthy communities, primary care deserves continued attention, support, and development to ensure access to all.

In Texas, however, we face an unfortunate truth: Many Texas adults don’t have a Primary Care Provider.