Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Community Impact Officer, Ascension, recently participated in a panel discussion as part of U.S. News & World Report’s annual Healthcare of Tomorrow conference in Washington, D.C.
The panel, “How Children’s Hospitals Can Make an Impact on the Social Determinants of Health,” was part of the conference’s Value and Population Health track and focused on ways leaders are rethinking their approaches to have an impact on the long-term health of children.
The panel discussed recent innovations providers have made in their neighborhoods to address the social determinants, which are conditions in which people live, work, play and pray that account for 80 to 90 percent of one’s health status. Numerous studies have linked environment to health, particularly among children and adolescents.
Dr. Duperval-Brownlee noted that many hospitals across Ascension routinely screen child patients for problems apart from the symptoms they may present during an examination, and try to connect them with outside services to help them and their families, including meeting their spiritual needs.
