Taking Health Care to the Streets | Dr. Cheryl Whitaker | TEDxNashvilleSalon

Heath care in underserved communities has poor results due to lack of access and engagement. To succeed, it’s necessary to innovate. What works? Borrowing a page from the community organizer’s playbook and hitting the streets, using care consultants who are from the community. They understand the conditions and the lifestyles that pertain to their community's residents, and are armed with mobile technology and know-how that can make a difference. How do you assess a patient’s neighborhood? None of the 81 measures health plans use to measure performance do, yet studies show that social determinants are up to 50% of what impacts health and the care patients receive.

Cheryl Whitaker, MD, co-founded NextLevel Health (NLH) in 2014 because government-funded health care programs often fail to reach their intended beneficiaries. This innovative for-profit health insurance company helps the underserved access and manage Medicaid services by borrowing a page from the community organizer’s playbook. NLH provides extensive patient services with a geographically based Care Management Team model.

Cheryl is a Washington University- and Stanford-trained physician with a Harvard MPH. After practicing medicine, consulting for the government and NGOs and founding NLH, she has a 360-degree view of the health care system as a patient, provider and now payor. This informs her conviction that payors need a new model of patient-centric engagement. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx