MetroHealth Will Use Innovation District To Address Health Disparities

MetroHealth will use a new partnership to further its work on health disparities and systemic health issues in Cleveland.

Gov. Mike DeWine announced Monday that Cleveland will be home to Ohio’s second “innovation district.” It's a health-focused, $565 million partnership with the city's three major hospitals--MetroHealth, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals--and two universities, Case Western Reserve and Cleveland State.

MetroHealth’s contribution to the partnership is called the Community Responsive Care Institute, said Julie Jacono, senior vice president and chief strategy officer.

The innovation district isn’t a brick-and-mortar place, but it is a place where data and research can be shared between the organizations, she said.

Jacono compared it to a hub with multiple spokes, where the spokes are the institutions, which will contribute information to the hub.

“It is such an exciting thing,” she said. “This pandemic, I think, has elevated everybody’s understanding that we rise together and we sink together and that is embedded in this collaborative.”

MetroHealth will use data and research compiled by all the partners, including area hospitals and universities, to address health outcomes like infant mortality at a systemic level, Jacono said.

“We’re tasked with identifying trends and how populations are faring, hopefully leading to early indicators of how populations are handling events,” Jacono said.

MetroHealth’s main asset that it's bringing to the partnership is the work already done in building an infrastructure to address health disparities, she said.

“We said we can bring to bear this infrastructure, the Institute for Hope, our social determinants of health network, our community trauma, our nurse-family partnership,” she said.

This past and present work will help build future programs for the innovation district, she said.

“There are things that are going to be possible because the five of us are equally contributing that would never have been possible without it,” Jacono said.

Job training will also be an important aspect of the collaboration because new MetroHealth programs require a workforce that doesn’t yet exist, she said.