Giving Compass' Take:

• Grantmakers In Health offer ways for donors and hospitals to partner to make an impact for community health.

• What are the top priority health needs of your community? What resources do hospitals have to leverage?

• Learn how to get the community involved in community healthcare.

Hospitals play a critical role in advancing the health of communities beyond providing medical care or community benefit dollars. As anchor institutions, hospitals can drive place-based change and improve health outcomes through local hiring, procurement, and other efforts that address the social, economic, and environmental factors that shape health. A growing number of hospitals and health care systems are looking to build healthy neighborhoods through more targeted use of their investment capital.

Hospitals, particularly those that serve low-income communities, often have a saying:

No margin, no mission.

While these institutions are committed to their “mission” of serving the underserved, regardless of ability to pay, these hospitals, like any other business, must have total revenues that exceed total costs in order to survive over the long term. Safety net hospitals, in particular, are generally not set up to make a huge profit but must have some margin to meet their mission of providing care for the sickest and most vulnerable people in our communities. Often, this means focusing on providing the highest quality, lowest cost care to be effective.

Hospitals can partner with foundations and the housing and community development sector to invest in healthy neighborhoods that address the social determinants of health and help to prevent disease altogether. As many funders explore nontraditional strategies such as impact investing to improve health outcomes, it will be essential to foster cross-sector collaboration with hospitals and health systems. By aligning efforts, hospitals, grantmakers, and other place-based investors can support healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities for all.

Read the full article about building healthy communities by Megan Sandel and Maggie Super Church at Grantmakers In Health.