A State-wide Initiative, Perfectly Aligned

At Health Net, we are guided by a vision of “creating a community where everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible.” It was with this vision in mind that we enthusiastically joined the Public Health Equity (PHE) project in 2020. This initiative, funded by the Health Information Technology funds from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS), focuses on developing a statewide infrastructure for social needs referral integration. As part of this initiative, Health Net was invited to become the Regional Health Collaborative (RHC) for Kent County. Currently, there are 57 counties in Michigan participating as Regional Health Collaboratives, which represents nearly 70% of Michigan’s population. Health Net leadership attends monthly meetings to collaborate with other RHCs, Michigan Medicine, and the Center for Health and Research Transformation (CHRT) staff to discuss how to improve the overall quality of health of community members across the state.

About Michigan’s Regional Health Collaboratives

The aims of the collaboratives are:

• To streamline care by connecting individuals to the health and social services resources they need in a coordinated way.
• Eliminate inefficiencies by building networks of community-based health and social services providers to maximize resources, eliminate duplication of efforts, and ensure seamless transitions of care.
• Improve interoperability by connecting health information with social service information in a secure and trusted way to meet individual needs and support data-driven quality improvement efforts.   

Major Contributions to the Work

• Health Net was the primary contributor to the data collection standards that would go on to become the Best Practice manual developed by Michigan Social Health Interventions to Eliminate Disparities (MSHIELD) in July of 2023.
• Various members of Health Net leadership participated in workgroup meetings to support the development of the Community Information Exchange (CIE) Core Competencies
• A partnership was formed between Health Net of West Michigan, University of Michigan Health-West, and Michigan Women’s Health Initiative (MiWHI) to pilot how we could better screen for the social needs of birthing parents to ensure they receive the support they need to navigate pregnancy, birth and parenthood. This partnership resulted in over 350 birthing parents served just in its first year!
• Health Net established parent groups to empower community members in taking an active role in addressing systemic barriers that their communities face. For these groups, Health Net provides continued engagement with individuals who identified an interest in being leaders in the community and would like to be a voice for their community. We connect those individuals to agencies that are looking for community input and agencies that are providing support for parents that want to be leaders.