Just before the pandemic, in December 2019, UPMC started its Center for Social Impact. Since then, the team has grown from two to twelve. The Center for Social Impact aims to address health on a holistic scale. UPMC has launched many programs in collaboration with partners. The motivation behind The Center for Social Impact was to collaborate, “We thought it would be useful to organize this into a more coherent framework, rather than a one off,” said John Lovelace, President of UPMC For You.
“As we think of how to influence healthcare, we consider ‘How does food impact healthcare?’, ‘How does housing impact healthcare?’, ‘How does poverty impact healthcare?’, those are much bigger questions that if you don’t think about them in an organized way, you are just spending money on healthcare without getting as much of an outcome as you could be getting,” said Lovelace. The goal is to broaden the scope and intersect healthcare with other funding sources. The collaboration will, in turn, create a more robust, synergistic approach. And ideally, the sum will be greater than the individual parts.
“There are many things we can’t do,” said Lovelace. But the program's foundation works to include existing frameworks and connections that people already have. It builds on what already exists and it makes the entire program more impactful.
The program recently partnered with a massive database in the county. “Data is a large part of everything we do. It helps us make more informed decisions about what we can do for people. We’ve developed a data sharing, HIPAA-compliant data sharing agreement with the county,” explained Lovelace. The data helps the program remain evidence-based and better support the community.
