Abstract for: From Concept to Practice: Group Model Building for Community-Clinic Linkage Design

The long-term vision for NYU Langone’s Beyond Bridges is to create an adaptive learning community to advance health equity across Sunset Park. One essential step towards this goal is our effort to re-engineer our health system in Brooklyn to dynamically interface with the social service systems in our community by creating a community-clinic linkage. In this practitioner application, we share results from the first phase of this work applying group model building to model how social needs are addressed currently in the community. Participants included community members, clinical staff and providers, and community-based organization staff. Activities occurred across two sessions and were replicated twice. In the results, we share themes from eliciting factors related to addressing social needs and discuss emerging system insights. We close with process reflections, implications for public health, and takeaways for the field of system dynamics.