Communities can help people be healthy by ensuring access to resources like quality education, affordable housing, health care, and public transportation. About 70% of population health is attributable to social factors like public policies, education, access to affordable housing, and social norms.⁶⁴ Often, the organizations providing these types of resources need to work together to achieve the best outcomes. Yet multisector collaboration is complex, challenging, and not well understood. Little is known about how to structure collaborative processes—or collaboration dynamics—to increase the chances of achieving collective outcomes like improved health equity.

One way to improve population health is to learn how to collaborate across sectors more effectively, since we know that “cross-sector collaborations and partnerships are an essential component of the strategy to improve health and well-being in the United States.”⁶⁵ However, “little agreement exists regarding how collaboration can be structured to generate greater value in particular settings and contextual environments.”⁶⁶

The Improving Population Health Through Multisector Collaboration brief series summarizes lessons learned about how multisector collaboration can be structured to increase the likelihood of achieving positive outcomes like improved population health. These outcomes are influenced by collaboration dynamics, or internal working processes, among MSC participants. This means that MSCs that intentionally develop healthy collaboration dynamics among participants can increase their chances of achieving desired outcomes.

Learn more about MSCs in the PHIL brief, “Improving Population Health Through Multisector Collaboration.”

View all references for the Data Walk.