P&P August 2016

from the collaborative

By Megan Lape

Human Services in All Policies The National Collaborative’s Focus on Multiprogram Coordination

F or all of us, health and well-being are key factors to living well and having a good quality of life. Where we are born, the quality of our schools, the safety of our communities, the avail- ability of jobs, and the level of stress on ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our colleagues are among the many external factors that impact our health from a young age through adult- hood and beyond. Understanding how these social determinants affect our health and well-being, and connecting them to helpful supports along the way, are the key to ensuring that each of us can achieve our full potential. A growing body of evidence shows that improving care and service coordination across multiple sectors, beyond traditional clinical health care services, together with the human services and public health systems, timely access to critical population- based health information, and leveraging existing public investments more effectively, can produce healthier and dramatically better and more sustainable outcomes for all families and communities. Human service programs and providers already in place are uniquely positioned to provide valuable contributions to improving overall health outcomes if they are effectively linked to, and coordinated with, the traditional and evolving health system. Over the past several years, APHSA’s National Collaborative for Integration of Health and Human Services (National Collaborative) has focused on rethinking how state and local health and human service (H/HS) agencies operate, developing tools to help them reconfigure access, and

The Integration Vision

A fully integrated health and human services system that operates a seamless, streamlined information exchange, shared services, and coordinated care delivery that is a consumer-focused modern marketplace experi- ence designed to improve consumer outcomes, improve population health over time, decrease poverty, increase employment pos- sibility and, ultimately, bend the health and human services cost curve by 2025.

—National Collaborative’s Bridging the Divide , 2011

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Policy&Practice August 2016