As a healthcare intermediary, the Integrated Health Network anchors and incubates new models of care that reimagine a healthcare system that works equitably for all St. Louisans by prioritizing the needs of low-income patients.
We understand that every action we take and every decision we make has the potential to transform lives and uplift our community. That’s why we remain committed to our mission, vision, and guiding principles.
Our Mission
Through partnership and collaboration, the St. Louis Integrated Health Network is a healthcare intermediary building capacity across sectors to advance health equity and improve wellbeing by increasing access to health and social services, with an emphasis on communities that have been historically excluded.
Our Vision
The St. Louis Integrated Health Network will be:
Guiding Principles
Our guiding principles reflect our organization’s core values and commitments, and they’re the compass that directs our actions and decisions. Practiced with fidelity, these principles help ensure the alignment between our overarching mission and day-to-day operations.
We hold ourselves accountable to these principles, and we seek partners who not only share our dedication to these principles, but also our commitment to a shared accountability.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to be as healthy as possible, which is why IHN works to increase access to high-quality, affordable healthcare for all St. Louis area residents. Achieving this aim means paying particular attention to medically underserved groups who rely on the safety net to meet their health needs.
IHN partners with community health centers, hospital systems, public health departments, academic partners, and other safety net institutions that share our mission to accelerate closing gaps in care for these groups and to align the many health services and resources that are crucial to their well-being. IHN values racial equity as an essential part of health equity and seeks partnership to share accountability for achievement of health equity.
As a neutral convener of healthcare providers and safety net institutions, IHN maintains an unwavering focus on improving patient health outcomes.
Patients receive better care when safety net services are coordinated and integrated, so IHN helps network partners share data, connect health systems, be accountable to the patients themselves and to their network partners, and pursue joint initiatives that save lives, contain costs, and add value with new approaches to enhance patients’ healthcare experience.
Effective collaboration and systems change require accountability and transparency. IHN works in concert with network partners to review group decisions, take responsibility for collective actions, and report the outcomes of joint efforts.
IHN also supports its partners in making available any information that helps the community to accurately assess and effectively address safety net deficiencies and promote the use of proven solutions across all patients served by the network. Such sharing strengthens network decision-making and enables partners to develop collaborative solutions that protect the most vulnerable community members.
IHN welcomes direct, constructive feedback among staff, members, partners and customers, and commits to providing actionable, constructive feedback to others in pursuit of accountability.
In addition to qualitative data, IHN uses patient stories, community input, and quantitative data to shape our understanding of the safety net and to help determine the best ways to improve the system of care. This combination of data sources provides multiple perspectives, bringing both community voice and established research to the center of the network’s deliberations and collective problem-solving.
IHN partners with academic institutions to leverage network data and to ensure that community priorities are integrated into research agendas. When available, we seek data from public sources, disaggregated by race, gender and ethnicity to identify trends in disparities.
To advance patient health outcomes, IHN seeks to move beyond past constraints and to consciously take risks that make safety net improvements not only possible, but probable.
IHN intentionally champions a culture of curiosity and ingenuity that enable partners and staff to test new ways to help patients realize their full wellbeing. Our network pursues both targeted and comprehensive change by establishing creative partnerships, implementing non-traditional programming, and sharing best practices.
Collectively, our partners commit to protect and enhance healthcare access and quality in and around St. Louis, and to communicate their efforts within IHN structures and the community at large. IHN commits to leveraging innovative strategies from national and local sources that maximize high impact change for our patients.
Racial Equity Impact Statement
St. Louis Integrated Health Network was born out of the necessity to ensure access to quality and affordable healthcare for historically excluded communities. We center ourselves in the fundamental truth that health equity cannot be realized without racial equity.
Racial equity is achieved when all communities reach their full potential through the elimination of policies, systems, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race.
Recognizing that practices of the past and present have shaped current gaps in health outcomes, the path forward for St. Louis requires us to mobilize and leverage the power of our community, partners, and systems to collectively disrupt these patterns.
Our Responsibilities and Commitments to Eliminating Racial Inequities:
- We will convene to raise awareness and accountability.
- We will seek generational change through innovative, holistic, and sustainable initiatives.
- We will lead advocacy, policy, and systems change.
- We will build and strengthen a network that is guided by community voice.
Through our collective commitments, we will transform and dispel the notion that poor health outcomes are individualized and influenced by race.