How Corporate America Can Address Social Determinants of Health Post-COVID-19

Many of us tend to place health as belonging in the purview of doctors and research scientists. But many health outcomes are also driven by “social determinants” – economic and social conditions that can leave a significant impact on both individual and group differences in the status of our health.

The social determinants include a range of factors we might not necessarily associate with wellness but have just as significant an impact as our eating and exercise routine. (In many cases, they impact whether we have the ability to even focus on wellness at all.)

These factors include economic stability, access to education, and the context of the community around us. Just consider how our immediate surroundings impact our ability to take care of ourselves; we can draw a clear connection between America’s high obesity rate and our unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity. Consider the impact of living in a “food desert” with no public transit access to fresh vegetables or farmer's markets.

If the factors that determine our health are myriad and fairly complex, it stands to reason that it will require a whole-of-society effort to improve health outcomes. We can’t put the burden entirely on health professionals – increasingly we need other entities to be focused on doing their part in addressing issues beyond access, cost, and quality of healthcare. We need to impact other factors we haven’t traditionally associated with health: economic empowerment, community development, transportation, and other social determinants. 

These issues are too cross-cutting for any single organization or even sector to address alone. That’s why progress will increasingly depend on partnerships.

But given the outsized influence of corporations and the private sector in contemporary life, large businesses have an opportunity to impact social determinants of health and contribute to building a healthier, better-balanced society. 

This shift to thinking about our collective health at all is a significant one for many Americans. We live in such an individualistic society that we can tend to think of healthcare as something firmly between ourselves and our doctors. But COVID-19 may have served to shine a light like never before on how interconnected we are and the importance of better understanding key drivers of population health – as well as what more we can be doing to optimize the health of entire communities.

In a sense, the pandemic served to expose the fissures that have persisted in our community for too long – from gaps in access to basic information on health to the corrosive impact of misinformation on vaccinations. Meanwhile, the shutdowns and lockdowns in response to the crisis also served to further create economic insecurity for those living on the most precarious rungs of the economic ladder.

The reality is that our well-being is indelibly shaped by the factors that surround us each day, from the quality of our housing to the levels of stress we live with each day. There is a clear connection between social and economic status and health status; one can’t be addressed without taking on the other.

Some steps corporations can take to move the needle on population health:

Prioritize workforce development. Another issue that COVID-19 exposed was the need to further develop the health workforce, which has been hit hard by shortages and retirements – not only of frontline workers like physicians and nurses but for all of those who are part of hospital infrastructure support doing everything from cooking and cleaning to transporting patients.

Prioritize career opportunities for under-represented groups. Corporation foundations can support pipeline programs that promote career aspirations and provide scholarships and training at multiple levels of schooling, many science and technology companies have developed internship programs for students and formed collaborations with local technical schools. Additionally, corporations can establish outreach programs to support skills-based hiring. For example, OneTen is a non-profit collaboration of corporations that have committed to hiring thousands of African Americans through outreach, skills-based hiring, and workforce development.

Build partnerships with surrounding communities. Too many of our corporate institutions remain too removed from their immediate neighbors, but thoughtful partnerships can help to form stronger community linkages and drive outcomes. I think of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has done innovative work collaborating with community groups and focusing on how to increase the financial empowerment of the low-income community in the surrounding area.

Expand support for mental health. Many companies have finally begun to speak up on the need for robust mental health following the stresses of the past two years, but more needs to be done to address this massive need. A non-profit called One Mind has been focusing on rallying large companies to demand better quality coverage and benefits for employees to address their mental health needs.

Ultimately, we have learned in recent years that none of us can live apart from the community that surrounds us. Population health is everyone’s responsibility. It’s a welcome first step that we have seen an increased awareness of the clear linkages between social determinants and our health outcomes. But now we must continue the hard work of forming partnerships that view interventions not as a cost, but as an investment in the long-term health of entire communities – and Corporate America is uniquely positioned to help lead the way.