ABSTRACT
The U.S. health care system is rapidly transforming toward a population health paradigm. No longer is it suffi cient for hospitals and health care systems to only provide high-quality acute care; they are additionally being tasked with what is arguably a more challenging goal-making people healthy and preventing illness. This approach is in many ways antithetical to the traditional structure of the health care system, which is designed to treat illness and disease in the biomedical model of medicine. But that is starting to change. As hospitals and health care systems take on the new responsibility of improving population health, there is growing recognition that the health care sector alone cannot produce healthy people. Only 20% of health is attributable to medical care; the remaining 80% is attributable to health behaviors, socioeconomic factors and environmental factors (University of Wisconsin Public Health Institute, 2014). It follows that effectively addressing the non-health-care-related factors will require an unprecedented collaborative, coordinated effort between sectors and with communities in order to achieve a shared goal-communities where all individuals can reach their highest potential for health regardless of their race, gender, education level or socioeconomic status. The following chapter will discuss how the U.S. health care and public health systems got to where they are today and present a path forward for hospital-community collaborations to improve population health.
