Evolving Your Talent
How do your talent needs evolve as you drive toward scale and how can you evolve with them? Health Leads on actively navigating talent through strategic shifts Alexandra Quinn, CEO…
Our vision: Health, well-being, and dignity for every person in every community. In the United States, health inequities exist at every level of health delivery, care, and social services. Health Leads works at the intersection of healthcare, community health, and public health to design and implement interventions that address the root causes of inequities, and test new models for how we build, deliver, and pay for health in the United States. To accelerate equity-centered health practice improvement and policy change, Health Leads acts as an “innovation hub,” using our national platform to spread the best practices and learning of our community partners from across the country.
Even in the shadows of the world’s most prestigious medical centers, health and healing are stymied by hunger, unsafe housing, and other poverty-related issues.
Health Leads bridges the gap between medicine and social work, equipping clinics with volunteers and family help desks.
Rebecca Onie founded Health Leads after seeing asthma was aggravated by unsafe housing, pneumonia by lack of heat, and what happened when a patient couldn’t afford both rent and medicine
Health Leads has served more than 23,000 patients, the majority obtaining at least one service within 90 days.
We work with healthcare organizations, community-based organizations, public health departments, and caregivers to co-design systems of health that are driven by the needs of each community. We design and consult others to design interventions that enable big and small process and policy changes to enable more equitable health access and delivery.
Health Leads works side-by-side with hospitals, communities, government and human service organizations, and community members to build/facilitate local coalitions to achieve shared health goals; advocate for/empower skilled caregivers; and establish data-sharing/measurement practices that improve health and inform policy.
Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Health Leads
As a college student working in a legal services office, Rebecca Onie saw up close how a child’s asthma was aggravated by unsafe housing, a case of pneumonia aggravated by lack of heat in the home, and other illnesses lingered because the patient couldn’t afford both rent and medicine. She founded Project Health (now Health Leads) with Dr. Barry Zuckerman, chair of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. For more than 20 years, Health Leads worked closely with hospitals, clinics, and health systems to connect people to essential resources such as food and housing alongside medical care. Today, Health Leads partners with communities, hospitals, health systems, and community-based organizations to remove barriers that keep people from identifying, choosing, and accessing the resources everyone needs to be healthy.
In January 2018, Rebecca left Health Leads to pursue a new initiative in health advocacy. The Health Leads board then voted to name Alex Quinn as Chief Executive Officer.
For over 20 years, Health Leads has worked with hundreds of health systems and clinics, community-based organizations and philanthropic partners across the United States, to make addressing essential needs “the new normal” in health and healthcare. Early work included launching one of the first technology interventions that mapped resources like food and housing, so that anyone locally could access those resources. Health systems across the United States (and some abroad) have adopted and adapted Health Leads early “desk model” including Kaiser Permanente, Massachusetts General Hospital Primary Care & Pediatrics, University Hospitals Cleveland Rainbow, Baylor Health, Dayton Children’s Hospital, Contra Costa County, and Johns Hopkins Health System. Health Leads created and spread multiple tools to enable better access to essential needs, including the “Screening Toolkit” which has been downloaded more than 20,000 times.The “Essential Needs Roadmap” and Resource Library tools have been used by healthcare leaders across the country and Health Leads supported 3,000 health systems and physicians in Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pilots to integrate social needs into Medicaid payment models. Recently, with healthcare, community health, and public health partners, Health Leads has co-designed and led policy changes implemented across the United States focused on food access, local housing access, and equitable COVID vaccines.
How do your talent needs evolve as you drive toward scale and how can you evolve with them? Health Leads on actively navigating talent through strategic shifts Alexandra Quinn, CEO…
Those without enough income to keep the heat on and food in the fridge are more likely to get sick than those with sufficient resources to meet these essential needs.…
Today, the US healthcare sector is no longer debating the connection between patients’ unmet social needs—like shelter, heat, employment, and food—and poor health. It’s widely recognized that just 10 percent…