To download a PDF version of this infographic, click here. The infographic captures the approaches detailed in our paper Disrupting the Pathway, A Medical Approach to High Utilization.

An Accountable Community for Health is a structured, cross-sectoral alliance of healthcare, public health, and other organizations that plans and implements strategies to improve population health and health equity for all residents in a geographic area.

The Accountable Community for Health (ACH) model provides a powerful opportunity for healthcare institutions to prepare for the collaborations necessary to succeed in this new health ecosystem. This brief outlines the ACH model, provides examples of relevant collaborations emerging throughout the country, and recommends several concrete actions for organizations interested in taking the next step toward adopting the ACH approach.

Disrupting the Pathway explores a primary prevention approach to reduce frequent utilization of high-cost healthcare services and includes model strategies that healthcare organizations and their community partners can collectively implement to improve community conditions that have a role in producing high utilization and subsequent costs.

Community leaders across the country are exploring the Accountable Communities for Health (ACH) model as an innovative opportunity to pursue population health improvement and health equity. The core of the ACH approach is harnessing the collective efforts of health stakeholders including healthcare, public health, behavioral health, school districts, other governmental entities, and community- and faith-based organizations. The success of this type of approach has been demonstrated repeatedly over the last 50 years through health improvement efforts that have incorporated both individual

Published by the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, Closing the Loop outlines some of the essential elements of sustainable funding mechanisms and argues that we need to “close the loop” by ensuring that when prevention efforts DO save money, substantial portions of that money get plowed back into prevention.