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Advocate Health Care’s $1 Billion Health Equity Bet

The Chicago area’s largest health system wants to boost health equity on Chicago’s South Side where life expectancy lags the North Side by three decades
By Bruce Japsen 

Advocate Health Care is spending 1 billion to re-invent healthcare on the city’s South Side in neighborhoods where there’s a 30-year life-expectancy gap when compared to the more affluent North Side.

Advocate Health Care’s investment will include $300 million in land purchases and related spending to build a new hospital that will replace a facility that is more than a century old. And another more than $500 million will be allocated to expand outpatient care executives say will be “embedded in the community.” Another more than $200 million will be invested in hospital and outpatient programs and services designed in part to address social determinants of health such as lack of access to healthy foods, housing, transportation and prescription drugs.

It’s one of the largest community-focused healthcare investments in the nation, industry analysts and those involved say, and comes at a time providers of medical care are investing in an array of services from food and nutrition to housing to make sure patients are getting the right care in the right place and at the right time. Health insurers, too, are increasingly paying to address social determinants of health beyond hospitalizations, physician services, prescription drugs and medical devices. 

“We are so far ahead of where we were 50 years ago technologically and in terms of the potential to decentralize care that I think the timing of this new effort is good as long as the principles do not get overly enamored with gigantic facilities,” said Jim Unland, president of Health Capital Group and editor of the Journal of Health Care Finance. “Some of the key issues from 50 years ago are still important, especially the issue of more primary care, more accessible modern care in ambulatory facilities, the greater use of team medicine and physician extenders, etc.”

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