By Jill Pease
Two major South Florida healthcare systems, Broward Health and Memorial Healthcare System, have joined forces in an ambitious and unusual partnership to increase healthcare access and improve health outcomes among people living in Broward County.
To help identify barriers to care and develop interventions that are backed by science, the systems turned to the experts at the University of Florida.
The healthcare organizations launched the initiative, known as Better Together, in February 2025 to address primary and maternal health care needs as well as food insecurity. Better Together aims to tackle ongoing health problems within the county such as a high incidence of poor maternal-fetal outcomes, uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes, a lack of primary care and more than 11,000 patients who self-report food insecurity.
With nearly 2 million citizens, Broward County, where the health systems are located, ranks among the top 20 most populated counties in the United States.
“Better Together has a very noble goal to work together to improve the health of the Broward County population,” said Lee Revere, Ph.D., a professor and Florida Blue Endowed Chair of the Department of Health Services Research, Management and Policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Given the significant amount of resources that Better Together will spend in this community, the efforts need to be data-driven to ensure impact.”
Revere leads a UF team tasked with aggregating data across both health systems, conducting analyses and developing heatmaps to highlight community-level disparities and areas of opportunity to address root causes of disparities in maternal care, primary care and food insecurity in Broward County at the neighborhood level.
“Through our community impact reports, Broward Health and Memorial had access to county-wide metrics to drive decision-making for Better Together, but we lacked the block-level intelligence to hyper focus our efforts,” said Melida Akiti, corporate transformation executive for Broward Health. “Thanks to Dr. Revere and the team at UF, we now have the data to personalize our outreach and clinical efforts, enabling us to understand the demographics, cultures and specific health disparities impacting Broward County residents down to a city block level.”
In addition to data analysis, the UF team is helping Better Together identify evidence-based best practices for interventions through comprehensive reviews of scientific literature.
“We combed the literature to find what’s been done before, what lessons were learned and interventions other organizations have found successful to help Better Together determine how to modify and implement targeted interventions for their populations,” Revere said.
Researchers are leveraging the resources of HiPerGator, UF’s supercomputer, to support data analytics. In addition to Revere, team members include Ara Jo, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor in the Department of Health Services Research, Management and Policy; Florence Wang and Lina Modjarrad, health services research Ph.D. students; and Belinda Vo, an undergraduate student majoring in health science.
“This is an opportunity for our graduate and undergraduate students to see the real-world questions health systems are trying to address and what that process looks like in practice,” Revere said. “The speed and impact of a project like Better Together help our students understand how quickly things move in the workforce and the importance of data-driven decisions.”
The UF team continues to support Better Together as interventions are developed and implemented.
“We are assisting with constructing short-term measurement tools as a part of assessing the long-term impact to Broward County,” Revere said.