Impact Accelerator Seeks Innovative Ways to Preserve Healthcare Access

With government funding cuts and policy changes putting increasing pressure on an already fragile health care safety net, two Stanford organizations are bringing together leaders in health care, policy, and community advocacy to advance innovative solutions.

Stanford Medicine's Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC) launched the Impact Accelerator in August with a dynamic two-day convening of Northern California healthcare safety net leaders, co-hosted by the Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS). This inaugural gathering activated the Impact Accelerator's mission to drive measurable improvements in care for marginalized communities while simultaneously reducing healthcare costs across the system.

“We convened this group with the concept that we could do more together than separately,” said Jason Cunningham, program director for the Impact Accelerator.

IAJS is a natural partner for the Accelerator’s work.

“Impact Accelerator’s community-informed, community-engaged approach to coming up with implementing practical solutions align with IAJS’s mission, and we are thrilled to be involved in the Accelerator’s work,” said IAJS founding co-director, Tomás Jiménez. 

Cunningham noted that both groups are focused on bringing together people with diverse perspectives and making connections in communities.

“A top-down perspective isn’t going to shift power dynamics or create an opportunity for disruptive change,” Cunningham said. “If we can get the artist and the healthcare person and the policymaker together, then we’re really pushing the envelope – we could be really creative.”

Deepening connections

On the first day of the gathering, attendees discussed several broad themes that emerged from pre-conference conversations. These included making primary care financially sustainable; streamlining the administrative requirements associated with programs like SNAP and Medicaid; and preserving access to healthcare for people who no longer receive Medicaid.

“There are a lot of people we can keep on Medicaid if we work at it, and if they don’t have Medicaid, we can preserve meaningful access to primary care,” Cunningham said.

Attendees worked through a series of exercises to identify bright spots - examples of successful programs to inspire thinking to develop responsive pilot interventions.

The gathering included networking opportunities for attendees, as well as a performance by vocalist Diana Gameros, a teaching artist for the Lullaby Project of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, which pairs new and expecting parents and caregivers with professional artists to write and sing personal lullabies for their babies, supporting parental health, aiding childhood development, and strengthening the bond between parent and child.

“She was able to very authentically storytell around the populations we were focusing on and really connect us to that heart and mind,” Cunningham said. “Artists do that better than anybody else — they can articulate complexity through their art.”

Looking ahead

On the second day, attendees deepened their insights on priority themes and structures, such as financing, research and metrics, and community voice, for the Impact Accelerator to advance solutions-focused interventions.

“We left with a charge to move this forward: pick one or two projects that would be bold, require us to work together, and be an opportunity for us to leverage these crazy times to be more effective,” Cunningham said.

The result of the two-day gathering was “a bold and elegant cross-cutting opportunity around ‘Preserving Access’ that we can move forward with quickly,” Cunningham said. To focus on ways to preserve healthcare access in the face of both state and federal cuts, the group is planning follow-up meetings, both for smaller groups focused on specific issues and for the larger group.

The Institute for Advancing Just Societies at Stanford University uses rigorous research and community-informed approaches to accelerate racial and ethnic justice so everyone can flourish.

The Stanford CERC Impact Accelerator identifies and spreads health care solutions that have an outsized social impact, particularly for marginalized or vulnerable communities, and have a measurable impact on the cost of delivering high-quality care.