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Clinton Foundation Completes Five-Year Community Health Transformation Effort in Houston

Work in Greater Houston with a wide range of partners, including GE Healthymagination, has improved community health and wellness since 2013; will continue through sustained Foundation efforts


Houston, TX – WEBWIRE

After launching its Community Health Transformation program in 2013 to improve public health in Houston, today the Clinton Foundation released a report detailing the impact and achievements made in the last five years to improve the health and wellness of Houston and Harris County residents. The Foundation, through its Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI), works in targeted regions to bring together diverse groups of stakeholders around a strategic plan to improve health outcomes, and then helps turn that plan into action. The Greater Houston area is the fourth region to adopt CHMI’s Community Health Transformation model, which has also been implemented and completed in Coachella Valley, California and Central Arkansas.

“For five years, the Clinton Foundation has worked in Houston to improve health in the community and reduce disparities in the health of people across race, ethnicity, and income,” said President Clinton. “Our staff brings a wide range of partners to the table, sets priorities for the community, and works with those partners to implement projects that address those priorities. In Houston, these projects include efforts to increase access to nutritious food, install new playgrounds and walking trails to encourage exercise, and improve doctors’ and hospitals’ ability to access vital patient records electronically. These projects have helped improve the health of people across Houston, and their ongoing impact will continue for years to come.”

An independent team of researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine conducted the evaluation for Greater Houston finding that CHMI has contributed to the development of several notable health-improvement projects including:

  • The establishment of a food scholarship program for college students and the mapping of food deserts to increase access to nutritious food and foster healthy eating;
  • The installation of two parks and a walking trail at area elementary schools to promote physical activity and address the prevalence of childhood obesity;
  • The development of an emergency telehealth system and expansion of access to patient information among medical partners to empower patients and increase quality of care; and
  • The revitalization of dangerous intersections using community art to improve pedestrian walkability and public safety.


The Clinton Foundation’s work in the region has been led by Greater Houston’s regional director, Toral Sindha. The report also details several ways that the Foundation and partner working groups will continue to be engaged in the years to come, such as Harris County Public Health continuing its support of the health care access and quality workgroup to develop and adopt a regional model that will address social determinants.

The report is available in full here: https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/chmi_houston-mainreport.pdf (link is external)

About the Community Health Transformation Model

CHMI’s Community Health Transformation model fills a key role in communities with a wide range of organizations who are all making a concerted effort to improve health and wellness. These entities include local governments; hospitals, doctors, and others in the provider community; local nonprofits and support groups; members of the local business community; and many others. Without one cohesive strategy, many of their efforts to promote health and wellness do not complement each other as effectively as possible, and therefore are not as impactful.

CHMI works in communities across the United States, helping unite community members around a blueprint for improving the health and wellness of residents, and then helping to turn that plan into action. This means bringing together a wide range of interested groups and stakeholders in the community, charting out common goals and objectives for improving health, and facilitating coordination and resources to support programs that achieve these goals. This equates to more effective community action, and more impactful progress in improving the health of the community.

We take a careful and deliberate approach to building out the blueprint and identifying ways to improve health outcomes. In each of our communities, we:

  • Take an intensive look at the community’s overall health and wellness, including an examination of community and population health indicators to determine areas of greatest need;
  • Convene key stakeholders from across sectors to hear more about what organizations and leaders have been doing and what their priorities are;
  • Work collaboratively with these stakeholders to chart a local Blueprint for Action, which includes key priority areas and specific recommendations;
  • Coordinate across sectors to help implement solutions identified in the Blueprint for Action; and
  • Work with national, regional, and local experts and programs to leverage additional resources that will help advance priority actions in the local Blueprint for Action.


We work with regions disproportionately impacted by chronic disease to improve health outcomes and close gaps in health disparities. The Coachella Valley is the first community where we began this work – other current focus communities include Adams County, Mississippi; Northeast Florida (Jacksonville); Knox County, Illinois; and San Diego County, California.

 

About the Clinton Foundation
Building on a lifetime of public service, President Clinton established the Clinton Foundation on the simple belief that everyone deserves a chance to succeed, everyone has a responsibility to act, and we all do better when we work together. For nearly two decades, that premise has energized the work of the Foundation in overcoming complex challenges and improving the lives of people across the United States and around the world.

As an operating foundation, we work on issues directly or with strategic partners from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors to create economic opportunity, improve public health, and inspire civic engagement and service. Our programs are designed to make a real difference today while serving as proven models for tomorrow. The goal of every effort is to use available resources to get better results faster – at the lowest possible cost.

We firmly believe that when diverse groups of people bring resources together in the spirit of true cooperation, transformative ideas will emerge to drive life-changing action.


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