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The Role of Marketing in Population Health: Part 1

By Susan Dubuque posted 05-16-2018 04:40 PM

  
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This three-part series of monthly blogs will present examples from around the country of health care marketers helping to deploy effective and innovative population health strategies for their organizations.

Understanding the Social Ecological Model
Loma Linda University Health (LLUH) is located in the beautiful, rolling green hills of California’s Inland Empire. But just a few miles away, in the city of San Bernardino, the population faces many social challenges, including a 12 percent high school dropout rate, poverty, and violent crime rates that are higher than state and national averages.

LLUH, in partnership with SAC Health System, placed a medical clinic in the heart of downtown San Bernardino in an effort to manage the health of uninsured and Medi-Cal (Medicaid) patients and encourage health and wellness in the community.

This is where the importance of social context comes into play — or more specifically — the Social-Ecological Model. In this model, we consider health status and environmental factors that impact the health of individuals as well as the overall community. These factors, or levels of influence, are depicted in the diagram below.
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Applying this type of thinking, leaders at LLUH realized that in order to improve the health of the community they had to first get at the root cause of poor health — in this case poverty. One solution to poverty is employment, and one route to employment is education and job skills.
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With that logic as a driving force, LLUH, in collaboration with the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, established San Manuel Gateway College. Following dialogue with San Bernardino’s school system and county and local governments, the college was established in the same building with the LLUH medical clinic. It offers six-to 18-month health career certificate programs that provide entry-level job skills and college credit for students who elect to further their education. Students can enroll in one of four programs: medical assistant, certified nursing assistant, community health worker or pharmacy technician, with others to follow. The first graduating class was in 2017, with certificates awarded to 34 graduates.

The marketing and planning teams at LLUH played important roles in establishing and promoting the medical clinic and college. And while the initiatives will not address every social ill in San Bernardino, they represent crucial first steps in overcoming huge barriers to health improvement.

Watch for part two of this special blog series next month.

By Susan Dubuque | Posted May 15, 2018
Principal and co-founder
ndp
Richmond, Virginia

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