Putting Care at the Center
Putting Care at the Center is the annual conference of the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AARP, and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and sponsored by the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers. The 2017 conference is co-hosted by Kaiser Permanente.
What is the National Center For Complex Health and Social Needs?
The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs, launched in 2016, aims to improve well-being for individuals with complex medical, behavioral, and social needs. It works to coalesce a new field of health care by bringing together a broad range of clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and consumers who are developing, testing, and scaling new models of team-based, integrated care. The National Center and its staff collaborate with other experts across the nation to develop best practices, inform policy, and foster an engaged and accessible community to develop this work and teach it to others.
The National Center's founding sponsors are the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and AARP, and it is hosted by the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.
Why a National Center?
People with complex health and social needs experience poor outcomes despite extreme patterns of hospitalizations or emergency care. Although significant health care resources are spent on these individuals, the care they receive has not made them healthy or well.
There’s a growing recognition – coinciding with efforts to reform how we pay for care – that to see different results we must deliver care differently. Care must be flexible and centered on the needs, goals, and circumstances of the consumer. It also must be based on evidence. This is the philosophy behind care for individuals with complex health and social needs.
Organizations and individuals throughout the nation are actively working to improve the care of people with complex needs through coordinated, data-driven, and person-centered approaches – integrating traditional health care with behavioral health care and social services such as housing, transportation, and educational support. The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs serves as a professional home for this diverse group, uniting and amplifying their efforts to improve care nationwide.
National Center annual conference
The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs was launched with a national conference, Putting Care at the Center, in Philadelphia in December 2016. The next National Center conference will be in Los Angeles in November 2017, co-hosted by Kaiser Permanente. Improving care for individuals with complex health and social needs requires participation of the entire health care community, including clinicians (medical, nursing, social work, psychology, and more), educators and students, researchers and data scientists, policy makers and advocates, and consumers, families and community members. The National Center conference is an opportunity for innovators and advocates for health care delivery reform from across the country, both pioneers and newcomers, to meet, network, and create a shared agenda for the emerging field of complex care.