By Joan Fischer, MA 
Memphis resident Clintonia Simmons and her teenage daughter had already resolved to lose weight and exercise more when Simmons saw a newspaper ad for a town hall meeting about childhood obesity. The description spoke to the challenges Simmons and her daughter were facing, and she felt drawn to go.Simmons was expecting a small gathering, but it turned out that some 1,000 people were in attendance, including Gov. Phil Bredesen. As part of a national initiative called Shaping America’s Youth, the meeting was convened by Healthy Memphis CommonTable, a regional health and health care improvement collaborative that brings together a wide range of stakeholder groups—from government, business, health care, faith-based groups, NGOs, schools, neighborhoods, and the news media—and serves nearly one million people.
The gathering, held in 2006, changed Simmons’s life. “At the time, no one was helping children with obesity,” Simmons recalls. “There wasn’t much out there. Learning about it made me feel more committed.”
In fact, her idea for a business was born there. Healthy Memphis Common Table called for proposals, and Simmons had the idea of creating a series of “Get Fit” exercise and nutrition DVDs for young people. The Common Table helped her find resources—mostly, a network of professionals who would help her pro bono—to get the job done.
Simmons is now president of Healthy Kids & Teens, Inc., which provides exercise and nutrition classes to after school programs. She is a certified trainer and nutritionist and is working on her MBA in health management. To offer services to schools that cannot afford it, she holds an annual 5K walk/run benefit that has become one of the city’s most popular.
And, between them, Simmons and her daughter have lost more than 80 pounds.
That’s the kind of success story that makes the Common Table proud—and it, along with some 30 other projects targeting obesity, has dramatically improved health lifestyle awareness and behavior in greater Memphis, according to Common Table executive director Renee Frazier.
“The Memphis attitude about what we can do as a community to impact health has just totally changed,” says Frazier. “Down at the waterfront, people are jogging and running. Community gardens have sprung up. People understand that we can’t have as much fried food as we’ve always had, that we have to try to walk 30 minutes a day. And that’s because of the Common Table’s ability to motivate and engage the community so that people see the value of improving their health overall.”
Frazier acknowledges that moving an entire community’s health profile upward is a long-haul endeavor. But increased community awareness and healthy behavior changes, documented in a 2007 progress report, signify a trend in the right direction, she says.
The success of Healthy Memphis Common Table has drawn national attention. Suzanne Mercure, a consultant to the National Business Coalition on Health, calls the Common Table “a great example of broad collaboration” and cites their major accomplishments as including:
- Broad-based participation that takes projects to the local neighborhood
- Common education and messaging for wellness and healthy lifestyle
- Approaches directed for physicians and health care professionals, business/employers, and consumers
- Access to information on quality including profiles at the physician practice level
- Common evidence-based guidelines for such conditions as obesity
- Expanded options for those with diabetes for access to health care educators and support
- Grant support for quality improvement initiatives
Both Mercure and Frazier say that support from the business community, led by the Memphis Business Group on Health (MBGH), has been key to the Common Table’s success. MBGH worked especially closely with the Common Table on “Aligning Forces for Quality,” an initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to engage consumers, providers, and payers to improve quality through public reporting of performance on key measures of quality of care.
On the Common Table website, consumers can also find quality ratings for patient experience, hospitals, and medical offices.
“We now have more transparency of information around quality of health care than we have ever had in this community, and that’s thanks to the Memphis Business Group on Health,” says Frazier.
Their partnership will continue to break ground with plans to create best practice guides for physicians whose ratings could stand improvement. Health plans in greater Memphis have agreed to collaborate on producing those guides, Frazier says.“This is important because typically the health plans would never do this type of work together,” she says. “Never in a million years.”
That unlikely collaboration bears further testimony to the vision and success of the Common Table—and the potential the Common Table approach could hold for other communities around the nation.
Joan Fischer, MA is a writer and editor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.