Impact Health and WNC HPI Host
2025 HRSN Innovations Learning Lab
Oct 23-24, 2025
Mountain Area Health Education Center
121 Hendersonville Road, Asheville, NC 28803
2025 HRSN Innovations Learning Lab
As part of this event, WNC HPI Experts in Residence Sen. Ralph Hise and Mr. Marc Malloy, along with Project Manager Soni Pitts, hosted a workshop titled Synergy in Action: Harnessing Interdisciplinary Teams for Transformative Change. We shared challenges, successes and lessons learned from WNC HPI’s experiences, and led participants through a structured exercise to collaboratively explore barriers, solutions and innovations for engaging in cross-sector engagement and collaboration.
We are honored to have been able to join Impact Health in producing this event, and look forward to finding more ways to strengthen and expand our partnership in the years to come.
HRSNs and the WNC Healthy Opportunities Pilot
Health related social needs are the social and economic conditions that affect an individual's ability to stay healthy, such as access to nutritious food, safe and secure housing, reliable transportation, etc. In 2020, North Carolina funded three Healthy Opportunities Pilots, “the nation’s first comprehensive program to test and evaluate the impact of providing select evidence-based, non-medical interventions related to housing, food, transportation and interpersonal safety and toxic stress to high-needs Medicaid enrollees,” including one in Western North Carolina. Over the past 5 years, WNC Network Lead Impact Health has built a highly-successful system from the ground up featuring a suite of crucial innovations in providing, operationalizing, standardizing, and evaluating HRSN services - a program that not only supports WNC residents with much-needed health supporting services, but also generates significant economic benefit to the organizations and communities through which it operates.
Subsequent evaluations of this work have demonstrated the value of this work in terms of improved health outcomes for recipients and reduced utilization of healthcare services. Download a copy of the Healthy Opportunities Pilots Interim Evaluation Report here to learn more.
On Oct 24th, 2025, the WNC Health Policy Initiative partnered with Impact Health (WNC Network Lead, Healthy Opportunities Pilot), Vircho Health, and the Impact Primary Care Network to welcome health leadership from across the country to explore new opportunities and innovations in Health Related Social Needs services and programming.
This purpose of this event was share insights and lessons learned from the WNC Healthy Opportunities Pilot, highlight successes and challenges of the program, demonstrate Impact Health’s newly-developed operational platform and framework (developed by Vircho), and share their innovative Impact Health Primary Care network model, a physician-led clinically integrated network that features a “whole-person approach” that integrates clinical and social care. The audience included health plans, social care network leads, social care technology firms, academic institutions, foundations, policymakers, consultancies, and others from across NC and the nation who are considering standing up or expanding their own HRSN-integrated healthcare models.
