David Zuckerman, President & CEO of Healthcare Anchor Network: Boosting the Local Economic Impact of Hospitals

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I have ongoing conversations with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Today, I’m delighted to welcome David Zuckerman, President and CEO of the Healthcare Anchor Network, a national coalition of over 70 health systems addressing the root causes of disease and strengthening local economies by leveraging their hiring, purchasing, and investing power. David has been at the forefront of the so-called anchor mission movement since launching the network in 2017 and has helped shape the field through widely cited toolkits, reports, and policy work published with leading institutions, including the National Academy of Medicine and the US Surgeon General’s Office.

He’s also been a featured speaker at events hosted by the World Health Organization and American Hospital Association amongst leading groups. Thanks very much for joining us today, David.

David Zuckerman

Thanks, Van. It’s a privilege to be here. Appreciate the invitation.

Van

Well, let’s start with definitions. For our listeners who may be new to this space, how do you define the anchor mission of health systems and why is it gaining momentum?

David

Yeah, that’s a great question. So speaking broadly, the Healthcare Anchor Network, or HAN as I’ll refer to it most of the time, exists to align hospitals nationwide around a common vision and also a practical framework for promoting economic inclusion and supporting local economies to create healthy, thriving communities. Our goal at the end of the day is to catalyze our 70 plus member health systems to individually and collectively leverage their hiring, their purchasing, and their investing — as well as other institutional assets that we’ll talk about as part of an intentional place-based strategy — to maximize their community impact.

This intentional commitment, which we see as applying the institution’s place-based economic power in partnership with its community to create mutual benefit, is what we call the anchor mission. It comes from this idea that health systems are anchor institutions. They’re place-based economic engines. They have a social mission through their nonprofit and public ownership and they’re uniquely positioned and incentivized to think long term about the vitality of their local economy.

These 70-plus health systems alone represent more than a 1,000 hospitals (nearly 40 % of nonprofit healthcare) and they employ more than two million people. They purchase one $100 billion annually in goods and services and have more than $250 billion in investment assets.

So, we believe that by working at the intersection of this mission alignment and good business practices, health systems can work together with other health systems as well as other locally rooted institutions to meaningfully address economic inequities, build community wealth, and improve community health.

I’ve been researching the most innovative practices in this area for about fifteen years now, as you mentioned in your very, kind introduction, and even in these challenging times, I remain a passionate advocate for what I think is the transformative potential of the anchor mission framework for addressing systemic issues in a pragmatic and practical way.

Van

I mean, it’s a brilliant idea to have your members think more broadly about the role that they play in the community. I came from the higher education system and especially in some communities, they were the only game in town when it came to the bigger employment engine. Tell me a little bit more about your background and how did you come up with this idea to bring this intentionality to healthcare?

David

Well, just exactly as you said, it’s oftentimes the only game in town. I can’t take credit for this idea in its entirety. This idea really emerges out of a body of literature that starts in the higher ed space, actually, with the work of the University of Pennsylvania, trying to think about its role on the west side of Philadelphia more intentionally, and for many years, it really resided in higher ed. It was connected to some larger goals around democratizing small institutions and creating a stronger civic society.

The precursor of the Healthcare Anchor Network started as a program at another think tank, the Democracy Collaborative, before we spun off and became an independent nonprofit in 2022. That organization was really focused on this question of community wealth-building. How could we scale many different shared-equity strategies that would help to broaden ownership and wealth-building in our communities and keep dollars local?

From that process, we really recognized that anchor institutions, health systems in particular, provide an opportunity to hopefully scale some of those strategies that are really exciting and innovative around the country but have remained rather small. And that’s a lot of what we’re trying to do, which is to scale different models of inclusive economic development, connect them to the potential that they can have with anchor institutions, and really saw that health systems are in some ways better positioned to run with this idea than higher ed.

Higher ed is still an important anchor institution, and it can do many of these strategies, but as the narrative in health care changed to focus more on the social determinants of health — to recognize that there were factors outside the four walls that were impacting the ability of the health system to meet its mission around addressing disparities and improving overall health and well-being for the communities they serve — there was this question posed around how can we do more with what we have?

I really think that’s at the heart of the anchor strategy idea: how do we leverage what we have more intentionally to have greater impact in our communities? This fit well with where healthcare was evolving and the understanding that many healthcare leaders were coming to around what they needed to do if they really wanted to meaningfully improve health and well-being in our country.

Van

You were talking about community wealth-building and that resonated so much with me. We wrote into Futuro Health’s mission that while we’re working on equipping communities with credentials and qualifications, our mission is actually about building the wealth and health of communities. So, I think we’re coming from the same place with our respective organizations.

And so David, your core pillars are focused in hiring, purchasing, investing, so I just wanted to invite you to give some examples of how your institutions are engaging in any or all of those pillars.

David

Sure. That’s a big question, so we can kind of take that bit by bit because there’s a lot of things we could talk about in those different areas. But I guess what I’ll just say is that our focus is promoting economic inclusion and strengthening local economies. Why we focus on those three areas is because they really remain the largest economic activities that these institutions do on a day-to-day basis and they have to do them in good times as well as bad ones. So, I really see them as opportunities to ask the question of ‘what if.’ What if we seek to have additional community impact when we do these core business functions?

I think that this question is really important in difficult times because the discretionary activities that organizations might do in good times go away. Grant funding is reduced, maybe capacity bandwidth is limited. So we have to do these things, why not intentionally try and channel a portion of our activities locally to our most in need communities that we are trying to serve through other parts of our organization? And this begins to get at the business case that I think we’ll talk about in a little bit.

But our primary areas of focus are Impact Workforce — how do we focus on both improving pathways in and up within the organization while also reaching communities that need employment the most; Impact Purchasing — how do we leverage our spend more intentionally to support and build the resiliency of the local business ecosystem, while saving costs and creating better service for our organization; and then with investment in particular, this one maybe is the newest to your listeners.

It’s really this idea of recognizing that health systems have to hold reserves that are traditionally invested in stocks and bonds on Wall Street and that’s really designed to ensure that the system has financial resources in bad times…that they continue to maintain their bond rating and other things around operations. So this is about asking the question of how in the course of doing that can we have more social impact and actually align those resources to our mission? Can we redirect some of those investments locally, still get a return, but also have an impact on things like affordable housing or providing capital to small and local businesses?  And that’s where we’re seeing really a lot of opportunity.

So, I’m happy to talk a little bit more in depth about specific examples, but I wanted to kind of paint that broad picture first of kind of what those strategies look like.

Van

I can’t wait to dive more deeply into all of those areas. Before we do, when an anchor institution comes to you, how do they make the business case to implement and get involved internally?

David

Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think you know that making these organizational shifts require taking a long term view. It’s not easy work. With many institutional processes that I’m talking about here, there’s been pressure to cut costs and we’re saying, actually, these are the levers you should be utilizing more intentionally to have impact in your community. There might be an ecosystem of partners needed. They may need to partner with other health systems or anchors to get the scale. And so we’re really trying to change the narrative and build a movement within the Healthcare Anchor Network to help our members realize they need to break down silos and create new ways of working across the organization and empower leaders.

So, as a national convener, we are setting institutional standards, disseminating best practices, consulting on strategy, capturing sector data, providing benchmarking, curating peer learning, et cetera.  I think that where we have to start with the business case is recognize that what we’re trying to do here around promoting economic inclusion and supporting local economies is not a “nice to have.” It’s really a strategic lever for improving health outcomes, operational stability, and long-term community vitality.

Some may say our work is a form of asset-based community development at scale, and what I mean by that is we are looking to build from strength, from our strongest community assets in a sustainable way to address deep rooted community challenges. It’s really a departure from the deficit focus mindset or the scalpel or precision approach of healthcare, you know, instead of trying to solve a really small technical problem, we’re  trying to leverage the resources to address more adaptive systemwide problems.

So I think there are multiple business cases for this work that come together to form a strong imperative, which can be a challenge for some. It’s not one simple, like, you do this, you’re going to save this amount of money. It’s more about, OK, how do we recognize with impact workforce strategies that this is about reducing job turnover rates, but it’s also about creating employment opportunity for our local communities.

Those are owned by two separate parts of the organization and recognizing the holistic nature of this business case imperative that if we partner differently, we can save on internal training, we can reduce time to fill open positions, we can develop new partnerships that help meet our business needs. But also in the process, we’re leveraging public resources better, we’re improving the skills of our workers, we’re helping to create additional economic stability for our employees, we’re reaching communities where we’re seeing there’s high unemployment and the greatest health disparities and helping to meet a community health need that is gainful employment that is at a livable wage. So all these things require this holistic picture around the business case, but there are multiple things that we can use to justify the imperative for this work.

As it relates to the other two strategies around investment and purchasing, I’ll just touch on them briefly, but for investment, let’s take the example of affordable housing. This is an opportunity for health systems through their investment portfolio to provide low interest loans to community partners that build affordable housing. They get the money back and they’re also solving a community challenge that not just affects almost every community in the country, but it affects their own employees and it affects their own patients. So in this very way, they’re working across what are often the three stated priorities of most health systems, their communities, their patients, and their employees to address a challenge in a sustainable way, leveraging a resource that they’re going to get back anyway. And so I think when we take a step back and look at the business case in that way, we start to see how many parts of the organization have an incentive to adopt these strategies.

Van

When you engage with health system leaders, what barriers do they cite most frequently that you help them take on in order to unlock action?

David

I think there’s often a perception about this being a lot of new work, and while there definitely is some of that, I like to remind our partners and other leaders in healthcare that I think that this idea is really about connecting existing organizational priorities that might cut across these three priority areas of community, patients and employees in a way that aligns resources more effectively.

So for example, if you are screening your patients for social determinants of health, and housing is going to be coming up as something that most many of them need, and then you’re looking out at your referral system and realizing there’s not enough supply of housing…well, what we’re offering with this framework is a way for you to work on both the supply and demand side of the equation. Or if you’re screening your employees for something like that, this is another way to connect the dots between how you think about employee benefits, as well as your opportunity to impact community.

So I think it’s about finding someone internally who can really speak in a compelling way to the mission imperative for this work, and then connecting it to a strategy of business sustainability. I think that strategy is there because so many facets of what we’re talking about — whether it’s community benefit, community health, environmental sustainability, improving employee belonging or screening patients for social determinants of health — there’s a lot of space for overlapping intersections that align themselves with the anchor strategies that we’re talking about here that frankly don’t come up because all of those areas of the organization are often working in silos. We force the conversation of why are these folks not sitting at the same table, seeing that actually if we do this one strategy around investment or we think differently about our supply chain strategy, that we can actually accomplish multiple things with this one initiative.

That is something that I think is going to be more needed in this coming period than ever before for healthcare. I think ultimately it will need to be treated like any organizational strategy with leadership, visibility and support, KPIs, responsibility designated to project managers and effective structures for cross-organizational communication.  I think if you put those things in place, that’s how you unlock action effectively. But it’s getting past that initial perception of this is another thing we need to do rather than actually this is a framework and a way of thinking that allows us to be more creative and align resources more effectively.

Van

And because it involves so many different divisions within a system, who is the champion of the anchor mission strategy? What are the titles of these people that would need to sign on a health system? Is it the CEO? Is it the COO?

David

I think, yes, the organizations that we’ve seen go fastest and furthest with this work have visibility and support from the CEO, CFO, executive team, visibility at the board level. Actually, there is often a lot of support at the board level because oftentimes if you bring, say, this conversation around investment to the board, the board is like, yes, this is why I, as a civic leader, wanted to be on this health system board…for the health system to do things like this for the community. Again, it’s kind of common sense way of having impact.

But then beyond those leaders needing to be supportive, we often do see the need for one executive sponsor to really own this at the C-suite level and that might be someone who wears a community impact, community health, government relations title…someone who has got that vantage point across the organization. But it could also be a CAO, it could be a chief strategy officer, because this really is a cross-cutting function for the organization.

And what’s important is that whoever is owning this has a strong relationship with the different departments on the operations side that I mentioned, right? Because ultimately this needs buy-in from the chief supply chain officer, the chief human resources officer, the chief investment officer. All of those individuals need to be bought in and empower their reports to be at the table to think about how they can partner with the external facing parts of the organization more effectively to align the different strengths and resources these different departments bring.

That’s what it’s about, right? It’s not about asking human resources to always be building relationships with community-based organizations or workforce intermediaries. Rather, it’s about how can human resources partner more effectively with those parts of the organization internally that can give them that visibility and that reach and bring value while letting human resources bring their expertise around how those community-based organizations or workforce intermediaries can better partner with the health system.

Van

A lot of our listeners are from the workforce side of the world, so let me pepper you with a question or two around workforce and the workforce needs of your partner institutions. Tell us where you think the puck is heading with regards to the allied health workforce within the partner institutions?

David

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think that there is a lot of interest in apprenticeship programs to build sustainable pipelines into allied health roles that are currently experiencing shortages or are projected to have shortages in the coming years. As one example, we bring together the leaders in human resources, talent acquisition or workforce development at these institutions, and convene a conversation on a monthly basis within our network. I think we’re one of the few organizations that does that and I think it’s really a value-add that we’re providing to the sector.

One of the things that emerged was that there was really a desire to understand and design apprenticeships for respiratory therapists. So, we created a group of health systems that were meeting to compare approaches on that specific topic. I think some other common roles for apprenticeship programs or “earn and learns” relate to LPNs, medical assistants, sterile processing techs, pharmacy techs, radiology techs. And we are seeking to actually begin a cohort with some of our members around helping them to build some of these pathways into these much needed allied health positions, but doing it in a way that they’re building new relationships with local workforce intermediaries and place-based partners with the hope that it won’t be just a one-off, but it will be more of a sustainable shift in how some of these organizations think about workforce development.

We’re using a specific methodology called Work Advance that came out of a number of workforce intermediaries over the last fifteen years that provides additional wraparound supports to hopefully create a more sustainable economic impact for the person going through the program.  That’s our goal. Again, this is how do we meet a business need for the institution, but ultimately how are we creating increased economic opportunity for individuals in the communities these institutions serve.

Van

In terms of hiring David, what models have you seen that effectively connect underrepresented community members to jobs and healthcare? Of course, in addition to Futuro Health…

David

Well, we focus with our pathways in and out. We call it outside in and the inside up model, and I think there are a number of things that help make this successful. One of them is the use of career coaches. An example of this is Ochsner Health in Louisiana, which I know was recently featured on one of your podcasts.  They have a strong model of connecting entry level employees with coaches who help them identify their strengths, map career pathways, help them navigate the systems training programs and tuition assistance, et cetera. The coach really becomes their advocate inside what can feel like a maze of departments and opportunities. So I think that’s the first one I would name.

Another that I would focus on is really partnership with community-based organizations. A key component of the outside-in model is identifying economically under resourced communities or zip codes for focused sourcing and recruitment, and then building or strengthening partnerships with these community-based organizations that actually help the health system recruit and create job readiness for these employees.

So it’s really important in that process of working with the community-based organizations to also work with strong workforce intermediaries that can then provide those skills training and wraparound support services that we know are really important to position these employees for success.  I’d say it’s also important to assess what potential barriers may keep a health system from hiring strong candidates.

So I would say that’s the next area that would make these outside in, inside out strategies successful, and one example is removing barriers to hire for justice-involved individuals. Advocate Health, I think, is a good example of this. They serve patients in six states, they’re a very large health system, and they partner with several community-based organizations to support the recruitment and retention of justice-involved individuals.

And maybe the last thing I would name is doing things like reviewing job descriptions to ensure they’re understandable for all potential qualified applicants and that unnecessary education requirements are removed. I think this is sometimes referred to as the shift to skills-based hiring. Those are just a few that I would name that help health systems to effectively connect underrepresented community members to jobs.

Van

Those four are examples of good models, so thank you for sharing. So David, what are some examples of how anchor institutions are working with local vendors to keep more wealth in the community?

David

I know your audience is mostly focused on workforce, but I think there’s some really interesting and innovative examples of how health systems are working around these other anchor strategies. And so I’ll just name a few.

One is that this past year in Chicago, Rush University System for Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital, a local foundation, and others helped launch Fillmore Linen Service. It’s a commercial laundry operation and it’s already started to bring 175 jobs to the West side and help revitalize the North Lawndale community.

Sometimes when people think about what we’re promoting here around working with local vendors or starting up new businesses, they think, this is going to cost me money. But in this example, it’s saving Rush more than a half a million dollars annually because they’re no longer shipping their laundry out of state.

So I really believe that there’s an opportunity for that win-win-win that I mentioned earlier in some of the responses to other questions. This idea of how do we meet a business need and help the community, and these things can align in a way that creates a benefit for the institution on both community impact and financial sustainability.

It’s not always possible, of course, to incubate a business from scratch, so one other strategy that we’re working on is to help our health system members to expand employee ownership, which is where employees actually take part in the profit sharing in the business to help build long-term wealth. And a way we’re doing this is to help our health systems identify reliable vendors they are already working with who are best positioned to convert to employee ownership.

Some people may have heard of the silver tsunami, this idea that a lot of folks are beginning to retire, and they are sole proprietors and they own these businesses which are gonna either be bought out by private equity or just disappear. So, is there an opportunity to actually think of an intentional strategy to convert those businesses to employee ownership — many of which are employing low to moderate wage employees — that might be a transformational, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help them build wealth?

Kaiser Permanente has led the charge here. They’ve already, working with our partner, Obran Cooperatives, converted two businesses to employee ownership helping more than 200 low and moderate wage workers. And we are working with them to help convert a number of other businesses and those businesses will lead to several hundred more workers becoming employee owners through this process.

So, how can health systems intentionally think about shifting dollars locally? That might start with supporting local food vendors. How can they think about identifying gaps in their supply chain where they can work with other local civic actors to create businesses at scale that can employ local workers like the laundry example, or how can they look at other businesses that already are doing business with them that they can help improve overall job quality there by helping them transition to employee ownership. So there’s a lot of different ways that health systems can lean in on the local vendor piece.

The last thing I’ll speak to on this is on the investment side. So we often describe the opportunity to leverage the balance sheet of the health system recognizing that these dollars, which are traditional investments in stocks and bonds, can also be invested in their own local community so they can get the social impact and a financial return. We track these investments that our health systems are making and for the most part, in fiscal year 2025, health systems made almost $100 billion in these impact investments that were rooted in the geographies they serve. They’re earning a lower market rate, interest rate, but having a social impact by addressing sustainable projects that positively impact social determinants of health.

Two most common ones are affordable housing – which I’m not going to talk about here, but that’s the bulk of these investments — but the other is really around financial inclusion and economic opportunity. $173 million of that almost $100 billion went to supporting loans for local businesses and families. These investments are largely made to community development financial institutions who are respected financial intermediaries who have a wide range of lending expertise. They provide personal loans, business loans, et cetera, and they help small business owners access the capital they need to grow their business and really help families achieve home ownership.

One example of this was actually not through a loan, but really through simply moving the money of the institution through a deposit which is something we all can do ourselves… we can move our money from a large national bank to a credit union. So BJC, SSM Health, and the James S. McDonald Foundation — two health systems, and a place-based foundation in St. Louis – moved a combined $15 million deposit to the St. Louis Community Credit Union. It’s a credit union that has a long history of reaching these economically distressed communities. Those dollars are going to be earmarked really to expand credit to local businesses, and there’s some great stories you can look up on BJC’s website.

One example is of a small business that makes hot sauce that benefited from this. One other brief example on this is Hawaii Pacific Health. They’ve actually been intentionally focused on how do they build the local capacity of their food producers, and they’ve made these similar investments to help local food businesses ultimately become positioned to contract with Hawaii Pacific Health. I think that’s the virtuous cycle…how do you build the capacity through investment, and how, over time, can you contract with these vendors through the procurement side and really have this meaningful impact on your local community.

Van

Well, David, I can certainly see the value of being a member of the HAN Network. You are challenging all the members and exposing all the members to think more broadly about the role and the platform from which they sit and how it can impact communities in all of these very creative ways. So, thank you for sharing these examples.

David

Yeah, that’s 100 % correct. How can we, as we do everyday operations in the organization, ask what community impact can this also have, and hopefully that just creates space for more creativity and innovation.

Van

So David, in this moment in healthcare where it’s facing so much disruption — not only the uncertainty about the federal funding, but other factors like the adoption of AI — is there value in creating a more resilient healthcare worker and therefore a more resilient community that can weather the changes within healthcare?

David

I think it’s always a good thing to be thinking about how do you build resilience of the employees in your community. I think resilience is really about how you want to respond to change and adversity, or how you’re positioned to better respond to the change and adversity that comes up. I think these are mindsets that are important for both the workplace and life. Anything an employer can do — especially one of the largest employers in a community — to nurture them is helpful.

In many ways, I think this idea of creating intentional pathways in and pathways up is about creating a system that allows workers to be more resilient and successful when change inevitably happens. It helps provide some support and structure to that process of change.  I think we see that one of the biggest barriers to entering the workplace, as I mentioned before, is soft skills or foundational skills training. Trainings that emphasizes not only technical skills, but all these critical workplace skills such as communication, cultural competency, strategic thinking, teamwork, et cetera…I think those are really gonna help participants achieve long-term, professional success.

Studies have shown that adding foundational skills components to a pathway program can increase hiring of those program graduates as well as increasing retention of those who are hired. In addition, adding the wraparound support services that I mentioned earlier are also really helpful. I think these skills and supports will help employees and large organizations to be not only successful, but be ready to adapt to the inevitable future disruptions in the healthcare sector.

Another thing that will help is more intentional pathways internally for lower wage employees. Call these “impact promotions.” These are employees who are promoted from positions that require less than a bachelor’s degree into a higher skilled, higher wage position or a lateral position with a comparable wage level, but greater career ladder opportunities.  I think the second piece — lateral moves or opportunity moves — speaks to the resiliency piece because I think it might facilitate career advancement more easily.

For example, one health system intentionally outlines specific pathways from entry-level positions to career ladders within the institution. As an example of what this looks like, someone who was hired into environmental services could participate in a training that will then allow them to move laterally into a patient care assistant position. And from there, they can advance higher in the organization, eventually making it to higher level patient care work by taking advantage of other supports.

This is an example of how you, again, can position an employee to be more resilient because they’re able to navigate the opportunities in the institution if something happens to the current role that they’re already situated in. And so I think those are a couple of ideas.

But going back to what I was sharing around how this idea of the anchor mission is about being innovative, creative, and asking questions about impact…the one example I want to give touches on how a health system can address the stressors that impact employees’ well-being and reduce their resilience. I mentioned these wraparound services. We know that lower wage employees are also more susceptible to debt and financial instability.

One example to me that’s so impressive is one that was developed by Franciscan Missionaries of our Lady Health System, always a mouthful, FMOL. They’re based in Louisiana and Mississippi, and they developed a strategy to help employees avoid predatory payday lenders, which charge prohibitively high interest rates for small loans. Unfortunately, Louisiana is one of the states with the highest rates of this.

They call this the Faith Fund. They launched it in 2018 and since then, more than 1,900 employees have accessed $8.1 million in low-interest loans, effectively averting long-term cycles of debt. They did a study on this and what they found is that this has resulted in the retention of more than $21 million of personal wealth when accounting for interest payments, penalties, and additional fees. Then they took it a step further and they’ve also partnered with local credit unions and banks to expand access to banking services and financial counseling because this really is an ecosystem problem.

I think what’s really amazing about this story, beyond all of the impacts they had, is that they didn’t have to spend a lot of new money to do this. They actually tapped into the system’s unspent flexible spending accounts, which are the dollars that when employees don’t spend them at the end of the year, they actually go to the organization’s bottom line. They took those dollars and they chose to leverage them with the credit union to create this financial product. This was, again, thinking outside the box, thinking about how they could have greater impact in a really sustainable way and I think this is something that most organizations could do if they wanted to.

Van

You shared so many wonderful tactics that could be employed to improve impact. I certainly learned a lot and I’m sure our listeners did as well. So, if there’s a healthcare provider out there interested in joining the HAN network, how do they reach you or your organization?

David Zuckerman (18:21.087)

Sure, so at www.healthcareanchor.network they can find all the information to reach out regarding membership or getting involved. We have an annual convening that we allow prospective members to come and participate in. I think our annual convening is the best way to really understand what we’re about. We have a tremendous amount of different opportunities for engagement and just would love to connect with any health system that’s interested in learning more about becoming a member.

Van

So, looking ahead, David, what makes you optimistic about the future of care and the role of your anchor institutions?

David

That’s a great question. Obviously it’s a bit of a challenging time out there. If I go back to my opening remarks, our goal is to align hospitals nationwide around a common vision and practical framework for promoting economic inclusion, supporting local economies to create healthy, thriving communities. I think this movement is needed now more than ever, and we remain committed to building it in healthcare and across sectors.

What’s in our favor doing that is the recognition that health is holistic and the recognition that collaboration is a must. We often hear that our partners recognize that even as they compete in the healthcare market for patients, they need to collaborate as it relates to the impact they’re having in the community. And so I think that the coming period will force us to continue to work smarter to improve people’s health more cost effectively, and I believe this framework is key to making that possible. It’s key to ensuring that the future of care is really one about the overall holistic health and well-being of individuals in the communities they reside in.

Van

I love that call to action. Health is holistic, collaboration is a must. Thank you very much, David, for joining us today.

David
Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity to share a bit about what we’re doing with the Healthcare Anchor Network.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.