Conference Presentation, Panel
The Business Case for Addressing Social Determinants of Health
Milken InstituteJoanne Kenen, Georges Benjamin, Thomas Moriarty, Ashley Perry, Lauren Shweder Biel, Emily Yu, Joanne Cannon, Lauren Schwader-Beal, Catherine Connolly, Michael Golinkoff
- Healthcare spending is projected to become unsustainable, growing to 20-21% of GDP within seven years, necessitating a shift from "do-gooding" to ROI-focused strategies that reduce inpatient utilization and promote value-based care.
- Systems are expected to leverage their influence as major employers and through lobbying shifts—potentially reallocating one-tenth of lobbying funds—to address root causes like housing, zoning, and food security rather than merely writing consultations or building apartments.
- Data analytics and business cases will drive the scaling of programs, such as "food as medicine" and produce prescriptions, by quantifying correlations between social risks and metrics like utilization, costs, absenteeism, and presenteeism to move interventions from philanthropy to core business operations.
- Specific investment and expansion targets include the Build Health Challenge's $20 million over six years anticipated to double local community investment, and CVS Health's plan to operate roughly 1,500 Health Hub locations by the end of 2021 to embed care in existing behavioral patterns.
- Medicare Advantage rules and the growth of managed Medicaid are expected to create financial incentives for health systems and payers to fund social determinants, with potential savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars from remedying issues like mold or pests acting as a business case catalyst.
- Corporate and public sector engagement is predicted to expand beyond immediate employees to include families and retirees, with Fortune 500 companies utilizing core competencies to address community health, while public-private partnerships aim to generate data on housing stability to support broader policy propositions.
- The transition of the social determinants conversation is forecasted to be bipartisan and increasingly focused on upstream economic and social justice issues, with a recognition that long-term solutions to historical problems like redlining require sustained, multi-sector collaboration rather than one-off success stories.
- Implementation of multidisciplinary plans focusing on three or four root causes locally is expected to significantly impact national cost curves, supported by mechanisms such as discharge lists of home needs to prevent falls and caregiver networks to improve chronic condition management.