Brief: CLPHA's Aligning Health & Housing Systems Initiative with UnitedHealthcare Community & State and CSH

Date Published: 
May 2nd, 2019

Aligning health and housing systems to improve community health
While social and economic determinants have a large impact on the health and well-being of families and individuals, the health care system has traditionally been disconnected from the human services systems designed to meet those needs. Despite growing recognition of the shared populations they serve and their interdependence in shaping outcomes, health care providers remain siloed from human services providers, including affordable housing providers.


The lack of system coordination and alignment leads to large gaps in service. Individuals with complex needs have trouble navigating these fragmented systems, which often results in receipt of insufficient levels of care and support. Uncoordinated and misaligned systems further traumatize vulnerable populations, increase health disparities, and produce negative outcomes such as increased emergency department utilization and cost. 

Better connecting, coordinating, and aligning health and human services systems can more effectively and efficiently address both health and social needs. Achieving this goal requires understanding between the systems and significant collaboration for building integrated systems of care and support that serve vulnerable populations. 

The Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA), and UnitedHealthcare Community & State (UnitedHealthcare) have created the Aligning Health & Housing Systems (AHHS) Project, a multi-sector collaboration to improve the health outcomes of Medicaid beneficiaries served through managed health care and living in publicly-assisted housing. The AHHS Project, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will design and implement systems of care and interventions that align health and housing resources at the person, program, and population level. 

The AHHS Project aims to move the national conversation around health and housing beyond the theoretical to concrete, replicable models and strategies that operationalize the vision of addressing social determinants of health. Learnings from the project will be disseminated broadly to encourage widespread adoption among health care and housing sector leaders and aligned systems. A key, final goal of the project is to develop health plan-agnostic solutions that can be implemented and scaled by UnitedHealthcare and other Medicaid health plans, regardless of their health plan coverage. 

The AHHS Project team partners believe that Managed Care and Public Housing Authorities are ideal partners, with similar scale and impact in local communities, to achieve this goal. Most importantly, the initiative will result in direct and concrete improvements in health and well-being for individuals, families, and communities.

 

Read the Brief 

 

 

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