Karin VanZant Suggests Looking at the US Health System from a Macro Perspective

Karin VanZant, executive director of Life Services at CareSource, explained that 1 issue in trying to improve the US healthcare system overall is that stakeholders are not taking a macro perspective approach. She said that what individuals and industry stakeholders should be focusing on is overall American well being, which includes aspects like housing and food access.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What do you think it will take for the US healthcare system overall to adequately address the unmet social needs of patients?

Thinking about that macro perspective of US healthcare, I think part of that is the problem, is we’re not thinking about overall American care. We put health on the front of it or we put housing on the front of it or we put food access on the front of it and then all of a sudden, we’ve created a silo. And then that silo perpetuates policies and rules and legislation and funding streams in order to address that silo.

And so I think when we start to think as a society about overall wellness, about overall care of ourselves and of our families and of our neighbors, we’ll start to break those silos down. We’ll start to have the types of information sharing that really need to happen for all of us to have coordinated care involved. And, it won’t be siloed into 10 or 15 different buckets because none of us can divorce ourselves from housing in an effort to address a broken bone. None of us can divorce ourselves from an educational background that we have in order just to address job attainment.

We have to bring all of those things together, and we either have those resources or we don’t. And if we don’t, we’re going to have to leverage the resources that we do have to fill that gap.