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U.S. Health

We envision a society where everyone lives in healthy communities and the benefit of good health is equally accessible to all.

Dr. Atul Gawande and FSG’s Mark Kramer discuss the untapped potential for community-based funders to transform the cost and quality of health care in the United States.

FSG helps clients understand and adapt to the changing and increasingly uncertain health care landscape. As focus and payments shift from volume to value of care, FSG can help organizations from the public, private, and social sector develop coordinated and comprehensive strategy and learning systems to enhance organization sustainability and improve community health.

FSG leverages our experience working in non-health areas, such as education and community development, to help clients address the social determinants of health to achieve their health improvement goals. We understand that factors outside the health care delivery system, such as housing instability and conditions, food insecurity, and neighborhood quality, contribute to persistent health disparities that have substantial human, societal, and economic costs. In order to help address this challenging national problem, we have placed health equity at the heart of our work.

FSG has extensive experience building and guiding cross-sector, collaborative, collective impact initiatives in health. Creating optimal health for communities and populations requires a systemic effort. We help clients identify opportunities to align health care efforts among a diverse array of actors, including foundations, hospitals and health systems, health insurers, public agencies, and corporations. Our combination of rigorous data analysis, skilled facilitation, comprehensive systems thinking, and deep passion for social change has helped these stakeholders jointly promote improved health for millions of people. 

U.S. Health Projects

FSG has worked across the country with a wide array of actors, including public and private foundations; health care providers; state, local, and federal public and health agencies; and public and private payers, in both urban and rural settings. This diverse experience helps us appreciate the distinct context of each client and create customized insights and recommendations. 

FSG staff were extremely creative and disciplined in guiding us through a strategy planning process that resulted in a simple framework to capture a very dynamic theory of change. Rather than developing a whole new set of activities and tools, they helped us reframe current activities to make them more helpful to us and to our grantee partners.
Lourdes Rivera, Former Senior Program Officer
Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice
Ford Foundation
The FSG team was very flexible and responsive. We are a complicated organization and they had to manage a lot of complex work and multiple stakeholders. They built strong relationships across our team.
Pamela Schwartz
Senior Director for Community Health Impact and Learning
Kaiser Permanente Community Health
Each individual on the FSG team was phenomenal to work with. They adapted to our culture, and they engaged our operations staff and our program staff. They were a true thought partner.
Earl Maxwell, CEO
St. David's Foundation
FSG's dedication to our strategic planning process is evident in all aspects of our decision making as an organization. We appreciate their attention to detail and creative approach to learning our way to solutions together. 
Dr. Octavio N. Martinez, Jr., Executive Director
Hogg Foundation for Mental Health
FSG did a top-level job—looking at the big picture, identifying issues, and providing practical guidance to working out problems.
Laura Leviton, Senior Advisor for Evaluation
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
FSG has become an invaluable partner in our journey. Their guidance helped us to transform our organization’s approach in the communities we serve to more deeply understand the dynamics and unique health challenges of each area, while placing local leaders in the driver’s seat to create needed change.
Patricia Mejia, Director of Community Engagement
Methodist Healthcare Ministries

How We Work

  • Adept at working on complex problems through multi-sector collaboration: Improving the health of communities requires an ability and willingness to work with partners from other sectors to address complex health issues and enhance their ability to learn from one another. We have experience advising leading health-focused institutions across sectors (e.g., foundations, providers, insurers, governments), both individually and collectively.
  • Fluent in health, health care, and social determinants of health: FSG has deep experience working with clients to design strategies that encompass a broad set of health and health care delivery issues. FSG has a deep understanding of the intersection between public health and health care delivery and has partnered with clients seeking to improve health at the population level through understanding and addressing the complex and interrelated social and environmental conditions that influence health.
  • Facility working with clients facing a transforming health care and public health landscape: FSG understands the implications of changes in health care delivery and financing and has a proven ability to co-create solutions and innovate with clients. FSG teams can quickly customize and adapt content and process to meet the unique needs of individual clients. FSG can serve as a facilitative or strategy consultancy as clients’ needs change. 

Research and Tools