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We’re here to make health — including health care — better. The end goal is a complete revolution in how people get and stay healthy.
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Health in the Landscape of Life
Enabling the healthscape, the ecosystem outside the clinic, requires improving the system to pay for health drivers.
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Research shows that as much as 80% to 90% of our health is determined by nonmedical factors such as smoking, access to healthy food, housing and transportation — also known as health drivers. That means only 10% to 20% of our health relates directly to medical care, where the vast majority of health-focused dollars are actually spent.

Although there is a lot more research and evidence on how to implement interventions that focus on health drivers, the majority of efforts still focus on hospital and doctor visits, not on where you eat, live or exercise.

Focusing on those drivers, Factor Health brings together community-based organizations, health care payers and investors in new ways to rethink the path to better health for vulnerable populations. The collaborative initiative tests and builds programs at scale that deliver health outside health care with outcomes worth paying for, with first efforts focused on addressing chronic disease and youth mental health.

Factor Health is a partnership between Dell Medical School and the Episcopal Health Foundation. It launched in Austin, Texas, in January 2019, followed with an expansion to Houston in October 2019.

Our work is about moving beyond traditional, fee-for-service care found in hospitals and clinics, to helping everyone in the health ecosystem — investors, health care payers, community-based organizations, academic medical centers — see themselves and the roles they can play in health differently.

Mini Kahlon, Ph.D., Vice Dean for the Health Ecosystem

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