Common Health Coalition: Five Major Health Sectors Join Together for Public Health

The joint commitment among the five founding members aims to leverage learned lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic response into actionable strategies that will strengthen the partnership between healthcare and public health systems.

In March 2023, the Common Health Coalition (CHC) was formed by AHIP, the American Medical Association (AMA), the Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP), the American Hospital Association (AHA), and Kaiser Permanente.

The joint effort is timely. Recently researchers analyzed data from across the globe on lessons learned in public health during the first years of the pandemic. The research concluded that coordination, communication, surveillance, transport, diagnostics, prevention, and logistics are the essential pillars in such an emergency and should be considered when planning to forecast, prevent, and face global emergencies.

ChangeLab Solutions, a national non-profit, specializes in law and policy to advance health equity. The organization will serve as the coalition’s host and facilitate the development of recommendations and will be guided by technical advisory groups of subject matter experts along with an advisory council of public health leaders. Recommendations are set for publication in 2024.

The Common Health Coalition Recommendations 

1. Greater coordination between public health and healthcare systems.
2. Building shared, well-maintained emergency preparedness plans.
3. Establishing national standards for healthcare data that help identify health disparities.
4. Modernizing infectious disease detection.

CHC is chaired by Dave Chokshi, MD, who led New York City’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including its historic campaign to vaccinate over 6 million residents.

Dr. Chokshi,

Now is the time to reimagine a health system in which health care and public health no longer work in parallel, but hand in hand — with health as the common goal and health equity as a common good

The coalition is managed by Chelsea Cipriano, who in 2020-2022 served at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Coalition work is led by an advisory council of public health leaders including J. Nadine Gracia, MD, President and CEO of Trust for America’s Health, and Georges C. Benjamin, MD, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association.

A member of the coalition’s steering committee and Senior VP and Chief Health Officer at Kaiser Permanente, Bechara Choucair, MD, can’t wait to get started.

The lessons we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic remain as urgent as ever and health care and public health institutions are ready to act on them.