News Feature | November 19, 2014

BUILD Health Challenge Aims To Bolster Innovative Community Health Collaborations

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

CHIME Healthcare Support

BUILD’s $7.5 million initiative will fund innovative collaborations designed to improve community health.

The new BUILD Health Challenge has been launched, and the initiative is designed to promote community-based, collaborative health partnerships to improve overall community health, according to a press release.

BUILD – Bold, Upstream, Integrated,Local and Data-driven – is a program created in a partnership of three philanthropies and a publicly traded company: the Advisory Board Company, the de Beaumont Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Kresge.

The BUILD Challenge is a national award program designed to provide equal opportunities to be healthy through community collaborations. According to the BUILD website, two types of grants, planning and implementation, are available to support collaborative partnerships among healthcare stakeholders to improve the health of low-income neighborhoods within cities with populations greater than 150,000. The program also provides a broad range of support services, including technical assistance, coaching and access to networks of population health innovators.

“Primary care, public health, and nonprofits – not to mention the private sector – have been operating in their own silos for too long, and the result has been decades of one-off projects, some of which are successful, and some of which are not,” Brian Castrucci, Chief Program and Strategy Officer at the de Beaumont Foundation said in the press release. “This is a coordinated, collaborative effort to develop tested models for population health improvement that can be brought to scale. If BUILD succeeds, we will change the way that medicine, public health, and the community interact, leading to better outcomes.”

According to a Kresge press release, the program’s goals are to:

  • promote health equity
  • reduce per capita health spending
  • shift resources and attention from treating illness to the “upstream” social conditions that affect the health of large numbers of people
  • create incentives for data-sharing and collaboration
  • identify and promote replicable and scalable best practices

BUILD Health will award up to $7.5 million in grants, low-interest loans, and program-related investments over two years in support of up to 14 community-driven efforts addressing health-shaping factors beyond individuals control.

“Community conditions such as safe streets, affordable housing and economic opportunity play a powerful role in shaping health. Improving these community conditions will require cross-sector partnerships that share resources, responsibility and data in new ways,” Chris Kabel, Senior Program Officer at Kresge explained in the statement. “BUILD Health will support such partnerships that focus their work in low-income, urban neighborhoods that are ready to create or enhance health-supporting resources and conditions.”

“Today, hospitals and health systems are increasingly adopting a team-based approach to partner with patients to better manage their own health,” Robert Musslewhite, Chairman and CEO, The Advisory Board Company explained in the statement. “To have the greatest impact on community health, this team concept must expand beyond providers to include other key players in our communities. I am excited for the BUILD Health Challenge to encourage these partnerships, to drive innovation in care coordination, and to measurably improve the health of our communities.”