Hancock- “Healthy 365” Story of Innovation
 

Hancock County System of Care is a partnership of local stakeholders across Hancock county that provide services to youth and families, which has developed Health 365. This is a population health initiative and whose goal is to address the needs of service delivery systems for substance abuse and mental health in the county. There are 47 agencies that are involved and provide input and support. They include the Juvenile Justice system, providers, social workers, local schools, state office for Medicaid and Family First. By promoting health, happiness and wholeness, they are approaching Health in a non-traditional and innovative way to ensure the policies and environment supports healthy behavior.

Health365 has developed over the past 4 months an action plan geared towards specifically addressing health behaviors. They are focused on building a coalition of diverse partners that work to
ensure Hancock County has neighborhoods, public spaces, work environments, transportation infrastructure, and retail venues that all promote physical activity and healthy living.

Best Practices

• Organized goals - They came up with three themes to address the full scope of this problem: Healthier Choices, Mental Fitness and Work Place Wellness. They all have within them 2-4 strategic areas of focus for which action items can be developed. E.g within Healthier Choices the goal was to increase access to and awareness of healthier food options.
• Partnerships - They made local partnerships to provide education in the communities about healthier food opportunities. They are providing information and access to care to everyone regardless of whether they are their patients. Also, there is an online farmers market that allows people to order fresh food and crops all year round to be delivered to a central location and picked up.
• Information -  There are 70 primary members who convene monthly to figure out strategies to disseminate this information in the community. They have thousands of secondary members who funnel information out through word of mouth. They are hoping to improve the way they measure improvements in health of the communities they serve. This will require improved and real-time data acquisition processes. They are also working on 3-4 health applications that can be provided to people, which will enable the collection of data from people’s smart phones and integration into their population health analytics software.

http://www.trusthchs.com/hancock