Zip Code Trumps Genetic Code: Trusts, Social Bonds and Convergence

When it comes to health, place matters.  To provide the necessary resources for community-level, policy-oriented, and broad-based prevention and health promotion initiatives, I will highlight some of the latest, and most promising, developments in the field.  I will focus on the significant steps that have been taken over the last two years to move us away from reliance on short-term grants, to make the difference in improving overall health.  I will focus on efforts to develop trusts (e.g., the Massachusetts Prevention and Wellness Trust), social bonds and major investments of banks (e.g., a Federal Reverve endeavor to fund community development with healthful benefits), the creation of population health metrics that encourage the allocation of a portion of insurance funding to primary prevention (e.g., multiple and concurrent/convergence efforts at the CDC, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, the Institute of Medicine and the National Quality Forum), and convergence funding (e.g., the widespread linkage of private and public funding to support non-traditional sector changes).  In each of these instances I will offer a general approach, the latest indication that this process is being attempted and a local example of what this has looked like at the community level. I will also offer preliminary findings that health has improved and/or costs decreased, if they become available.