Director, Community Health Programs–Innovations
Spectrum Health
FOCUS
The vast majority of a person’s health is determined by everything but whether that person walks into a doctor’s office. Wealth, housing, and social capital have an extraordinary impact on people’s health and whether they can withstand a health issue. As Director of Community Health Programs–Innovations at Spectrum Health, my work focuses on how Spectrum Health can impact health at the individual and system levels. This means I spend most of my time in the community focused on specific health issues, neighborhoods, or subsets of people to develop targeted, universal approaches to community-level health needs. I was the architect of the first pay-for-success project in Michigan, led the development of the 30-organization place-based Invest Health collaborative, and co-founded Equity PAC to target key equity issues such as policy reform and diversity of government.
STRATEGIC INITIATIVE: Cook County Health & Spectrum Health Centers for Health Equity and Innovation
Both Cook County Health (CCH) (Chicago, Illinois) and Spectrum Health (Grand Rapids, Michigan) are working to develop Centers for Health Equity and Innovation. Our strategic initiative aims to develop a community engagement framework to operationalize health equity through innovation. Each of the Centers will provide a space for internal and external partners, funders, and community members to engage with CCH and Spectrum to design programmatic and technological health and wellness innovations that extend into the community and seamlessly integrate within the health systems. Our strategic initiative will: 1) learn from existing models and best practices; 2) build a framework for community engagement and community participation for innovation centers; 3) create a framework for the operationalization of health equity; 4) implement the model at Cook County Health and at Spectrum Health; and 4) develop a team of RWJF leaders who can work nationally to promote and expand the model.
MORE ABOUT JEREMY
My work spans 17 years of leadership in health care, philanthropy innovation, and political action. I believe that targeted, universal approaches that bring unusual suspects around the table to agree on material history work best as starting points for sustained, healthier communities.
Click here to watch Jeremy’s Legacy Project video.