Cardiovascular Health

Controlling hypertension and helping people lead healthier lives

100 Million Healthier Lives Initiative

The St. Mary’s County Health Department works with local providers and community sources to support a control of hypertension program.

100 Million Healthier Lives is a collaboration of global change agents with the goal of helping 100 million people live healthier lives by 2020. 100 Million Healthier Lives is built on the belief that innovative models do exist in the U.S. and around the world. But in order to take better advantage of these models, we need to join forces to learn what’s effective, together. Conversations with leading health organizations around the world reveal a hunger for collaboration and connection among community members, community-based organizations, health care systems, social sector agencies, public health departments and other organizations to achieve levels of population health not seen before.

The 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative is built on a distributed leadership model that taps the broad expertise of many members and organizations, drives exponential capacity, and invites and encourages our partners to actively lead portions of the work. It is our belief that this structure of distributed leadership will pave the way to far greater sustainability of the effort over time and best leverage the skills, will, and assets of everyone who wants to improve population health at scale together.

Our Core Principles

Promote equity, justice, strength and wholeness in the process of creating health
Partner deeply and respectfully with people, especially those with lived experience
Adopt a humble posture of learning and improvement
Intentionally work to remove barriers in critical areas such as payment reform, technology, etc., through collaboration with traditional and nontraditional partners
Make our collaboration an example of what is possible

Our Priorities

To determine our priorities, we sought recommendations from work groups of cross-sector experts on what changes would be most critical to achieve the goal of 100 million people living healthier lives by 2020. Hundreds of member action plans were reviewed to understand what was important to them and what assets our members brought to the table, with some priorities emerging as the most critical for shared learning and action. “Topical Hubs” are forming to organize work on these priorities, and individual members are encouraged to identify where they want to focus their efforts. These hubs are groups comprised of people and organizations committed to thinking, planning, learning, and driving results in a topic area critical to the achievement of 100 million healthier lives by 2020.

Some priority areas for determining what needs to be done include:

Addressing equity gaps
Helping children have a great start in life with the skills they need to flourish
Improving access to primary health care for all
Creating the best possible wellbeing in the elder years and at the end of life
Engaging everyone in improving their own health

Priority areas to determine how to go about improving overall health include:

Integrating improvement and change methods at the community level
Using the top chronic diseases in each community and core risk factors to build a continuum of health across home, community, public health and heath care
Engaging employers and businesses to improve workforce health and wellbeing
Developing and adopting financing strategies that align funding and support the development of health at the community level
Shifting culture and mindset, including developing a culture of wellbeing and partnership

For more information about the 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative, click here or call the St. Mary’s County Health Department at 301-475-6707.