The Fund supports networks of state health policy decision makers to help identify, inspire, and inform policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund supports two state leadership programs for legislative and executive branch state government officials committed to improving population health.
The Fund identifies and shares policy ideas and analysis to advance state health leadership, strong primary care, healthy aging, and sustainable health care costs.
Keep up with news and updates from the Milbank Memorial Fund. And read the latest blogs from our thought leaders, including Fund President Christopher F. Koller.
The Fund publishes The Milbank Quarterly, as well as reports, issues briefs, and case studies on topics important to health policy leaders.
The Milbank Memorial Fund is is a foundation that works to improve population health and health equity.
March 2021 (Volume 99)
Quarterly Article
Original Scholarship Population Health
Lauren A. Taylor
Elena Byhoff
March 2023
September 2022
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
Context: Recent health policies incentivize health care providers to collaborate with community‐based organizations (CBOs), such as food pantries and homeless shelters, to address patients’ social determinants of health (SDOH). The perspectives of health care leaders on these policy changes have been studied, but the perspectives of CBO managers have not.
Methods: Our research question was: How are CBOs in Massachusetts perceiving and responding to new Medicaid policies that encourage collaboration between health care organizations and CBOs? We interviewed 46 people in leadership positions at CBOs in Massachusetts for approximately an hour each. We analyzed these data abductively, meaning that we iterated between inductively coding transcripts and consulting existing theories and frameworks.
Findings: We found evidence of a knowing‐doing gap among CBOs. Even though CBOs value their distinctiveness and autonomy from health care, they have undertaken a series of organizational changes in response to the new Medicaid policy that make their organizations appear more like health care organizations. These changes include adopting new performance metrics, hiring clinical staff to the board and senior management positions, and using medical language to describe nonmedical work. Drawing on institutional theory, we suggest that the nonprofits undertake such changes in an effort to demonstrate legitimacy to health care organizations, who may be able to provide new sources of critically needed revenue.
Conclusions: Massachusetts CBOs perceive health systems as potential sources of revenue, due in part to an ongoing Medicaid redesign that encourages the integration of health and social services. This perception is driving CBOs to appear more like health care organizations, but the impacts of these changes on welfare remain unknown.
Keywords: social determinants, community-based organizations, knowing-doing gap, medical sociology.
Read on Wiley Online Library
