Community Benefits
Community Benefits activities relate to accessibility, quality and cost of the community's health system, as well as to community health and well being. Community Benefits pay specific attention to community collaboration, community capacity building, and people in the community with unmet health needs.
Community Benefits in conjunction with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and other health service organizations are working to organize and manage needed and beneficial community benefit programs. Collaboration with health service and other community organizations is an important characteristic of community benefit efforts. These initiatives can target physical, mental, emotional or spiritual health, as well as community well being. Their activities may involve funding and/or in-kind contributions including personnel, time, space, or other resources.
Some examples of the many types of community benefit programming include:
- improving access to primary care, especially for the medically indigent
- managing some aspects of the uncompensated care problem to improve access to humane charity care
- facilitating enrollment in health care coverage for vulnerable populations
- providing direct assistance to community services
- supporting, providing and advocating for health education, health promotion and disease prevention
- collaborating with other community organizations in quality of life or healthy communities initiatives that create the conditions in which people can be healthy.
Being a community health center means truly caring for our communities as clinicians, health educators, interpreters, social workers and case managers, public health specialists, community partners, diversity advocates, meeting places for neighbors, and good employers. Without this multi-faceted approach, we would simply be medical practices with limited influence on the long-term health of our communities.
Serving those who need us the most is the legacy of BIDMC's founders. On behalf of the staff at Bowdoin Street, the six other BIDMC-affiliated health centers that make up the Community Care Alliance (CCA) and BIDMC's Office of Community Benefits, we pledge to continue that legacy.
