Inside Oklahoma City's New Health Empowerment Zone Initiative

A new initiative is taking aim at improving health outcomes in underserved communities, starting with northeast Oklahoma City. Oklahoma Complete Health and the Urban League of Greater Oklahoma City (Oklahoma City, OK) have joined forces to launch a Health Empowerment Zone, which is an effort to address serious health disparities such as maternal health, youth well-being, behavioral care access, and social drivers of health like transportation and food insecurity.

With $300,000 committed over three years, the partnership aims to bring direct services, education, and community collaboration to neighborhoods with some of the lowest life expectancy rates in the state.

To learn more about what this new zone means for local residents and how it could become a model for the rest of Oklahoma, we spoke with Clay Franklin, CEO of Oklahoma Complete Health and Dr. Valerie Thompson, CEO and President of the Urban League of Greater Oklahoma City.

Q: What is a Health Empowerment Zone?

Franklin: "So, while at Oklahoma Complete Health, we have initiatives to improve health outcomes across the state. We've identified specific communities that have the lowest health outcomes. And what we do is we invest in those communities with established organizations like the Urban League to help improve health outcomes in these communities. And those communities are called health empowerment zones."

Q: Can you tell us about that partnership?

Dr. Thompson: "We're really excited. We're really excited that Oklahoma Complete Health has reached out to Urban Lake. It's going to be a great partnership. They have committed $300,000 over three years to really make a significant impact in Northeast Oklahoma City. So we're just excited for the partnership."

 Q: Where are these Health Empowerment Zones?

Dr. Thompson: "Northeast Oklahoma City, that is our health empowerment zone that we're targeting. And we're looking at infant mortality, maternal health, and youth outcomes. So we really wanna focus on looking at how we can improve health in Northeast Oklahoma City.

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