We are thrilled to report that the HealthierHere Governing Board unanimously approved our 2019 Investment Strategies and Budget, enabling us to move forward with the implementation phase of our work.

The strategies presented were the result of a highly disciplined prioritization process that measured potential investments against our values and their ability to impact our Pay for Performance metrics. This is a foundational year, laying the groundwork to bring transformation to scale in the years to come. With that in mind, the approved $8.7 million budget will be used to catalyze and incentivize innovation in three focal areas:

Strengthen foundational system infrastructure and capacities through training, technical assistance, and practice coaching to help providers develop the systems, tools and skills to implement population health and transition to value-based care.

Co-design systemwide tools to enable community and clinical care by bringing community and clinical partners together to co-develop blueprints for systems and technologies to enable whole person, integrated care.

Catalyze and test cross-sector innovations to improve outcomes through seed funding for quick tests of cross-sector innovations that support transformation and have the potential to improve health outcomes for our region.

With approval of the budget, HealthierHere will be entering into incentive/performance-based contracts with an initial cohort of Medicaid providers, including Behavioral Health Agencies, Federally Qualified Health Centers and Hospitals.

As implementation gets underway on the clinical side, we are progressing in our work to identify our first Community Practice Partners. When that process is complete, we will be prioritizing and evaluating the potential community-based investment strategies using a similar process. There is separate and substantial funding set aside by the Governing Board to support community partners in their transformation. Stay tuned.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone who helped bring us to this exciting new phase. We especially want to express our gratitude to the 55 board and committee members who gave generously of their time and expertise over the past several months to help us determine how best to achieve maximum impact with limited funding.

Let the work begin!