External Tools

“There is mounting recognition that to truly improve health outcomes in the U.S. and curb chronic diseases there must be an interdisciplinary, coordinated, and cross-sector approach to address acute conditions and the upstream social factors that contribute to poor health outcomes.” The Public Health Leadership Forum (PHLF) and Health Care Transformation Task Force (HCTTF) developed a framework that “outlines essential elements of collaboration and presents key tactics and strategies for forming or reshaping effective partnerships.”

“MAPP is a community-driven strategic planning process for improving community health. Facilitated by public health leaders, this framework helps communities apply strategic thinking to prioritize public health issues and identify resources to address them. MAPP is not an agency-focused assessment process; rather, it is an interactive process that can improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and ultimately the performance of local public health systems.”

“Local health departments (LHDs) and community health centers serve similar populations and play vital roles in their communities. Working together, they can better serve their communities as efficiently as possible through better coordination and an increased focus on wellness and prevention. This set of tools is designed to support collaborations between LHDs and community health centers CHCs to increase access to and quality of critical services for underserved populations.”

“Working across sectors begins with speaking the same language. If you’re lost in a sea of acronyms, this tool can help.” The Build Healthy Places Network built this tool to help explain jargon typical of both the housing and public health sectors.

“This playbook guides community developers toward partnerships with hospitals and healthcare systems. Although the community development sector is the primary audience for this playbook, it also has utility for public health departments, hospitals, and healthcare systems that are interested in learning more about the assets community development organizations bring to partnerships and how they can be leveraged for sustained impacts on population health.”

“The Practical Playbook is a stepping stone in the next transformation of health, in which primary care and public health groups collaborate to achieve population health improvement and reduced health care costs. Like a sports playbook, the Practical Playbook defines the role of each team member as well as actions for different situations. Throughout each stage, the Practical Playbook provides helpful resources such as success stories from across the country, lessons-learned from existing partnerships, and further guidance from industry experts.”

“[The Public Health Innovation Playbook] is designed to help you undertake and succeed at your own and your organizations’ innovation journeys. It is a companion resource to support and maximize the success of innovation projects.”

“[LIIF] developed the Social Impact Calculator, a new tool that allows you to put a dollar value on the benefits of things like an affordable home, a great school or access to transit—as well as calculate a rate of social return.”

“The Good Collaboration Toolkit is a set of materials aimed to help individuals collaborate well and build successful collaborations. Through a series of activities, participants will be asked to consider questions, dilemmas, and cases involved with all aspects of the collaboration, most especially the process of collaboration. …this Toolkit provides participants with an opportunity to work through exercises, as persons and in groups, which can be useful to the collaborative process.”

“The Intersector Project is a non-profit organization that empowers practitioners in the business, government, and non-profit sectors to collaborate to solve problems that cannot be solved by one sector alone. The Intersector Project's work is both sector- and issue-neutral — created for practitioners from all sectors, working on a range of issues, across the United States. Because the models and methods for cross-sector collaboration are proliferating, The Intersector Project’s resources speak to the broad array of collaborative approaches that practitioners in the field are actively using to solve problems.”