The Backyard Initiative - Working together to improve health in our community

Nearly half of Allina's 23,000 employees work in the Backyard.
The Backyard is home to one of the most diverse communities in Minnesota. About 32 percent of its residents are white, 26 percent are black, and 22 percent are Hispanic.
About one-fourth of the community is foreign born.
A highly mobile population lives in the Backyard. Between 1995 and 2000, 64 percent of residents moved.
While high school graduation rates are comparable to Minnesota as a whole, unemployment is twice the state rate (9.8 percent compared to 4.3 percent).
Almost 44 percent of the community is low income.
People living in the Backyard experience higher rates of asthma and obesity and lower rates of health insurance than the state average.

What is the Backyard Initiative?

The Backyard Initiative is Allina's effort to galvanize a coalition of community residents and community-based, government, education and health care organizations towards improving the health and health care of residents of the community .

Where is the Backyard?

The Backyard is the approximately one square mile area surrounding Allina Commons (Allina's corporate headquarters), Abbott Northwestern Hospital and Phillips Eye Institute. Communities in the Backyard include Phillips and parts of the Central, Powderhorn Park and Corcoran neighborhoods of Minneapolis.

What's the plan?

Announced in May 2008, the Backyard Initiative began with Allina engaging in many conversations with community stakeholders. Backyard Initiative focus areas were identified based on those conversations, combined with a review of the research about which economic and social conditions ("social determinants") are most likely to impact health.

Our plan now is to test these focus areas with residents by engaging them in community conversations about what improving health and health care means to families living in the Backyard.

Engage communities

The Backyard Initiative represents a significant new approach to broadly addressing both personal health and community-wide factors that influence health. Allina intends to seek input from residents, organizational leaders, and employees to guide planning and implementation for the Backyard Initiative. Meaningful change requires thoughtful planning and time to build a community-based infrastructure that includes Allina as a respectful convener, partner and resource rather than a health system with a stock set of answers.
Allina will leverage existing wisdom by working with community leaders to help develop the roadmap for the Backyard. Community wisdom will help to define what works. Throughout the planning process, there will be openness to modifying the Backyard roadmap to include additional areas of focus as they are identified by community members.

Build bridges

Allina's goal in this area is to build community partnerships to improve health. Allina will provide support for the Neighborhood Health Alliance, a concept developed and led by health-focused neighborhood organizations serving Backyard residents. Allina will support the Neighborhood Health Alliance in their efforts to reduce complexity faced by residents in the Backyard seeking all types of health services by building relationships and improving communication among service providers.
Over and over, Allina heard that while many organizations are serving Backyard residents' health needs, far too often those services get delivered in "silos" where one organization often doesn't know what others are doing, or could do, to serve the very same families. The Alliance will help build bridges between organizations to support more effective and coordinated service delivery.

Focus on prevention

To prevent health problems before they occur and reduce problems when a disease exists Allina will focus Backyard resources on prevention. Combining Allina's core expertise in clinical and public health, we will develop screening and wellness programs for Backyard residents.

Primary prevention efforts will focus on increasing physical activity, improving nutrition and smoking cessation.

Secondary prevention efforts will leverage key Allina clinical services including, including cardiovascular care, neuroscience, cancer, women care and eye care.

Expand access

Allina would like to ensure families have the tools to access appropriate health care in the right place at the right time. Specifically we will invest in Portico Healthnet. By expanding Portico Healthnet's proven strategies for increasing access to health care services into the Backyard we will expand coverage for the 22 percent of residents currently uninsured. Portico connects families with public insurance programs and safety-net coverage for those ineligible for other coverage. Portico case managers also provide families with the tools necessary to effectively navigate the health care system.

See how Portico Healthnet helps families access health care. (Windows Media Player required)

Start early

Allina intends to support and promote quality early childhood experiences for children living in the Backyard. This focus combines health and early learning strategies to make sure young children and their families get off to a healthy start necessary for success in school and beyond.
To support and promote quality early childhood experiences for all Backyard children, the Parent Aware quality rating system will be rolled out to any interested Backyard early childhood programs in 2009. In addition, Allina will identify other partners interested in this goal. (For more about Parent Aware, visit www.parentawareratings.org.)
In 2010, we would like to work with others to connect young children (prenatal to 2 years old) and their families with a community-based home visitor focused on supporting health, parenting and early learning. Ideally, when those children reach age 3, they would receive scholarships for high quality early childhood care and education programs, based on the early childhood investment model proposed by economists Art Rolnick and Rob Grunewald from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This approach recognizes the critical link between health and school readiness, but expenses will be contingent on additional financial investments to make it happen.

Who is paying for this?

Allina commits to funding specific elements of the Backyard Initiative as part of its over-arching Center for Healthcare Innovation. But Allina cannot do this alone, so we will work to secure other support leveraging our reputation and our commitment to this work.

So far, $50,000 matching grant from United Health Group will provide support for health care access through Portico Healthnet. Other funding proposals are pending.

How will success be measured?

Backyard Initiative planning continues to engage residents, Allina employees, and other community stakeholders. That continued engagement will be critical to the Backyard's ultimate success. Allina will partner with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and Wilder Research to talk with residents about health.

Also critical is the strong evaluation component to be built into each Backyard activity. Evaluation results will help guide mid-course corrections to the approach and to gauge the impact on the health and well-being of participants and the Backyard as a whole.

Anna Thompson, MHA

Project leader, The Backyard Initiative

Manager, Public Policy and Government Affairs

"Our goal with the Backyard Initiative is to focus on developing relationships and collaborations necessary to improve the health and health care in the Phillips Community and the Central, Powderhorn Park and Corcoran neighborhoods. Allina's corporate headquarters, Abbott Northwestern and Phillips Eye Institute are all located in this one-mile radius. We know that there is an incredible amount of work already underway in our neighborhood.

By bringing together residents, researchers, policy makers, community leaders and others, we will forge new models for improving the health of this community. Our goal is to better understand how medical, social, educational and economic factors are interdependent. We will then determine where we can have more impact by working together, across social and community institutions, than by working alone."