Dr. Jennifer Lundblad

clinical outcomes, health outcomes for a person are far less related to the care, clinical care they receive, the medical care they receive, than a whole bunch of other social and environmental factors affecting their health.

So again, healthcare has come to this realization a bit slow from our perspective, but we're now there and we're now understanding that health-related social needs are such important drivers of a person's overall health.

And if we're not

doing our work and focusing on the quality of health and care in ways that include what happens outside of the walls of health care, then we're not really thinking about whole person care.

So that has completely changed our orientation.

That's completely changed

how we engage and the kinds of cross-sector facilitation and convening and planning and action that we're helping to have happen in our communities.

Well, we look to you and organizations like yours to help us with that.

You know, we're fond of saying that change happens at the speed of trust.

And so we want to build those trusted partnerships.

Sometimes we're a behind the scenes person.

facilitator and change agent.

And so we might not be the one out in front, but we're kind of helping bridge and make those connections.

In other ways, we're reaching out and bringing community organizations together so that they have

strength in numbers and voice because it often feels like an uneven playing field.

I'm gonna give you an example of an initiative we've been leading for the past few years in Minnesota that's about co-creating a shared approach to social needs resource referrals in the state, right?

So as I mentioned, there's this increasing understanding of the importance of health-related social needs and now health systems

are interested in that and how they make referrals and health plans and payers are interested.

But a system that addresses health related social needs is only as good as the community based organizations are in terms of their sustainability, their infrastructure, their ability to move those data through and respond to and meet those needs.

So we eventually want to get to a system where we have closed loop referrals, like everybody has party to the same information.