Established in June 2024, the MHA Council on Health Access and Community Impact brings together voices from across the MHA membership to advance a shared commitment to improving healthcare and health outcomes. Over the past year, the council has transitioned from defining its scope and purpose to launching work that supports meaningful, systemwide change.
This shift led to the formation of workgroups aligned with key drivers of care delivery transformation, a priority in the MHA 2025-26 Strategic Action Plan. Collectively, the council and its workgroups aim to advance strategies that optimize operations across access, quality improvement, patient experience, community alliance and care integration.
Shared Focus, Clear Direction
Central to this work is a commitment to delivering safe, high-quality and reliable care to every patient, regardless of circumstance.
The council also recognizes that meaningful transformation requires moving beyond traditional clinical models. Integrated care must address the full range of factors shaping health, including social, structural, behavioral and clinical conditions, while elevating community voice and advancing population‑level impact.
Workgroup Purpose and Progress Highlights
Driven by this focus, the council workgroups share common objectives:
- Develop practical roadmaps and tools for scalable implementation across member hospitals.
- Outline approaches for integrating and operationalizing best practices.
- Advance recommendations for statewide adoption to be presented to the MHA Board of Trustees.
Three workgroups are currently active and meet monthly. Highlights include:
- Quality Improvement (QI): Members of the workgroup conducted stakeholder and subject-matter expert interviews with national, state and academic QI leaders. Insights from these conversations informed the development of a draft blueprint and implementation framework to guide statewide and hospital‑level QI initiatives, with an intentional focus on addressing persistent gaps in outcomes and advancing quality.
- Patient Experience and Community Alliance: This workgroup is developing a framework that expands the patient journey beyond clinical encounters to strengthen partnerships with patients and communities by aligning engagement and communication strategies with lived experience and local context.
- Care Integration: The workgroup is identifying gaps in how clinical and social care are operationalized across health systems, including staffing, IT infrastructure, policies and workflows, while informing scalable best practices and alignment across the state.
Looking Ahead
As the council and workgroups move forward, the focus remains on scalable solutions that advance care delivery transformation while centering community partnership and measurable impact.
Members with questions about the council’s work may contact Ewa Panetta at the MHA.