When Claudia Williams started The Other 80 she was searching for evidence that whole person care – meaning the integration of social and medical care – is a viable model to bring more equity and health to all Americans. 

We started with some big questions. Can we flip the US healthcare system, making it more compassionate, more effective and more focused on health? Can we better address poverty's impact on health by integrating the often siloed worlds of medical and social care?

In this episode Claudia sits down with her producer Avery Moore Kloss to discuss lessons learned and highlights from Season One and share what’s on deck for Season Two. 

We discuss what we learned in Season One: 

• Data is the foundation of whole person health, but can also create new harms

• Organizations expert in sick care will not also be expert in community health 

• We need new organizations and leaders combining these traits: health not sickness focused, the ability to scale, community-embeddedness and deep use of technology and data

• Success requires ecosystem thinking, effective partnering and purposely balancing power differentials 

• Addressing equity takes time and trust

• Learning in public – like we are doing on this podcast – is critically important to speed the national learning curve for health beyond medical care

Claudia also shares her biggest takeaway:

"Underneath a lot of this is just poverty and how hard it is to live in the United States if one is poor. And so I think the question that I'm still grappling with is how far should we go in putting on people who are working in health the responsibility of the impact of poverty? And one one way to answer that is to say, well look at all the resources that are in healthcare, yes, of course, this is what's making people not healthy. Of course, we should spend these resources on housing, on food on other things. Other people, though, are saying, but wait a minute, those people are delivering health services, they're not even delivering health services well, why should there be this expanded mandate for them?”