Last month, 1,000 experts converged for the 2016 Forum on Population Health Equity, an event hosted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Jeffery Brenner, who leads the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, served as keynote speaker.

At the event, he spoke to other social health and sciences leaders about his efforts to build Camden Coalition of Health Providers, which aims to improve health of Camden residents by enhancing the quality, capacity, coordination, efficiency, and accessibility of the healthcare system. He went on to detail the implementation of a successful technique developed by Camden Coalition, known as “hot-spotting,” which uses data to discover outliers – the small subset of patients with complex, hard-to-manage needs and chronic conditions.

Through hot-spotting, health care providers are better equipped to care for high-needs, high-cost patients who are unable to be treated by standard health systems. In addition to dedicating resources and designing intervention models to treat the patient’s medical needs, hot-spotting is also capable of addressing other issues that the patients may face, including unemployment, housing, mental health, substance abuse, and emotional support.

Dr. Brenner’s discourse on hot-spotting was then followed by a panel discussion on using social network interventions to address health equity. Among the panel was Yale Associate Professor Andrew Papachristos, who spoke on “social contagion” – a process that uses to data to analyze patterns of gunshot victimization.

Taking an interest in each other’s work, Brenner and Papachrsitos, who never met prior to the forum, made plans to collaborate in the future. Ichiro Kawachi, who organized the event along with a team from Harvard Chan School, said elaborated on the collaboration, stating “That’s exactly the kind of thing we hoped would happen when we planned this Forum.”