Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated health system, is joining the CityHealth initiative, which promotes nine evidence-based policies addressing issues that have a major effect on health, such as affordable housing, education, and clean air.
Created by the de Beaumont Foundation to promote practices that make cities healthier, CityHealth tracks and reports on proven policies, and works with cities to advance policies that achieve community health priorities. Through this new relationship, Kaiser Permanente will leverage its expertise in health policy, government relations, and community-based prevention to accelerate cities’ efforts to improve people’s health and quality of life.
The first steps of this joint effort will be to identify municipal leaders’ community health policy priorities, and to assess the support they may need to help advance those policies.
In a prepared statement, Bechara Choucair, M.D., Senior Vice President and Chief Community Health Officer at Kaiser Permanente, said, “We share the de Beaumont Foundation’s belief that the power of local policy is one of the most promising and effective strategies for transforming health in America, and we are pleased to join them in this important work. The CityHealth initiative provides mayors and other community leaders an opportunity to harness some of that transformational power to improve health, drive down health care costs, and save lives.”
Brian Castrucci was recently named the de Beaumont Foundation’s CEO after six years as Chief Program and Strategy Officer. “We’re excited to have Kaiser Permanente join us in this effort to transform health in cities across the country,” he said in a statement.
