In personal and professional spaces, the ways healthcare fails patients is both explicitly discussed and tacitly acknowledged. I don’t know anyone, not even technology and innovation optimists like me, who fail to see that the US health system incentivizes treatment over prevention and that even the funding mechanisms for innovation are biased in ways that reinforce inequalities of access and outcomes. Healthcare’s misalignments are so widely accepted that they’ve become a kind of table stakes for communicating a basic understanding of the operating climate for healthcare delivery.
Naturally, solving even a tiny problem in a massive, deeply flawed system such as US healthcare is…well, a lot to do. But it is possible and deserves your support.
What Systems Change Really Means
Here’s what you need to know: Supporting change of the type HLTH Foundation is working on (techquity, which means developing and implementing technology to make sure quality healthcare is available to people who don’t have it today; equitable leadership opportunities; and a system that looks reflexively to patients to inform innovation) offers a different value and feeling from the return on a donation you might give to other very worthy causes that directly support people in need.
Investing in systems change is an act of faith, because it means you believe something better is possible.
A Practical Example of Systems Change
A timely example: More than a single hospital referring food-insecure patients to a soup kitchen, systems change is the cultural recognition that food is medicine, and the behaviors that follow that belief—such as the innovation of new platforms and programs connecting health systems, health plans and community based organizations in a cohesive response to hunger.
I am not here to argue against donations that directly support individuals. In fact, our mentorship program, CSweetener, does just that–though our goals go beyond any one participant in the program. We make healthcare career mentorships available to women and nonbinary applicants in multiple countries, with an explicit welcome to people of intersectional identities–for example veterans, people with disabilities and people of minority ethnicities who hold fewer leadership roles.
Why CSweetener Exists
Why do we operate this way? Because healthcare leadership today is still missing many perspectives, and eliminating blind spots is an important step in creating healthcare that works better for everyone.
TL;DR: CSweetener exists for both individual and systemic transformation, and that goal shapes who and how we go after applicants.
For example, our focus on women is specific and not only about fairness. Eligibility begins at mid-level, where representation of women leaders tends to drop off.
Further, women are responsible for the majority of healthcare decisions, parenting and family caretaking–so, while admittedly gender is only one dimension of diversity, a lack of women in top roles means that women, children and the elderly, seriously ill or disabled family members in their care are not well represented in decisions about the healthcare system.
Further, promotions and pay raises are linked to mentorship and in general, when people earn more they have better health and economic wellbeing.
Finally, CSweetener is free for a year to eliminate financial barriers and encourage many applications to help us get there faster.
Technology and Access Gaps
Likewise, technology is increasingly important if not essential to accessing healthcare, but it is not readily available or useful to millions of people–including many people most in need of care. By championing the innovators working to overcome health disparities, making their work available as examples to the market, and analyzing the data we receive from applicants to our Techquity for Health Awards program, we’re able to share insights and are accumulating the data needed to drive the industry more effective innovation practices. A few examples of patients who will benefit include those living in rural communities with a shortage of physicians or no local hospital, people lacking experience with navigating a healthcare portal or telehealth appointment, and patients on Medicaid or Medicare.
What HLTH Foundation is Building
The value of the work we do at HLTH Foundation is in, step by step, demonstrating and gaining acceptance for ideas and practices that show us MORE IS POSSIBLE in healthcare. It is also in the power of collaboration: finding others taking steps on intersecting paths that lead to shared insights, evidence and combined vision so that obstacles once perceived as immutable are reduced to an assumption of solvability.
Like democracy, healthcare is a system and will become what we make of it.
It’s clear that change is necessary. So next time you give, please donate to HLTH Foundation as an investment in the possibility of something better: a healthcare system that harnesses the power of technology and the brilliance of diversity so everyone has an opportunity for better health.