Prevention Institute Publishes Report On Alternative Funding Community Prevention

How can we start paying for things that make people healthier, instead of just treating them when they get sick? The Affordable Care Act has helped catalyze an explosion of ideas about how to expand access to healthcare and control costs. We know that community prevention—changing the social and physical environments of communities to keep people healthy in the first place—can go a long way. In this report, we identify new, cutting-edge ways to pay for these efforts.

Prevention Institute researchers talked to health-system innovators around the country to identify emerging new approaches. The result, How Can We Pay for a Healthy Population? Innovative New Ways to Redirect Funds to Community Prevention, doesn't provide all the answers about how to fund prevention but is intended to serve as a catalyst to encourage more innovation. The pioneers we profile in this report have found surprising new ways to capture funds already in the healthcare system and redirect them to pay for population health measures that prioritize community prevention.