Updated: December 9, 2019
Baker’s career devoted to tackling healthcare inequities
By Liese Klein
Category: Community Service — Advocacy/Policy
Pat Baker, CEO, Connecticut Health Foundation
It’s not often that an organization can claim to change the entire conversation around an issue.
The Connecticut Health Foundation under founding CEO Patricia Baker has helped focus policy and actions by philanthropists, government and advocacy groups on the fact that individuals from disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups in our state are less healthy.
“Equity is a theme you’ll see in my work and in my life,” Baker said. “We need to focus resources here in Connecticut to make this a more equitable state in terms of access and delivery of health care. It is challenging, daunting and imperative, but we’re tackling these entrenched and persistent racial and ethnic health disparities.”
With its $130-million endowment and access to top decision-makers, the Connecticut Health Foundation (CHF) has made healthcare equity its highest priority under Baker’s stewardship.
“She’s always been a leader, she’s always been visionary in her thinking and pushed the state to move forward very positively,” said Vicki Veltri, executive director of the state’s Office of Health Strategy (OHS). Baker helped formulate OHS as an agency charged with improving access to care and has also been a strong voice in the state on the importance of data collection and improving outcomes.
“I think her legacy will be around her visionary leadership, really forcing conversations on tough issues that the state overall had not really tackled in a cohesive way to try to improve health outcomes,” Veltri said.
Baker took the top post at CHF in 1999, shortly after the foundation was created with assets allocated as part of insurer ConnectiCare’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit status. Leading a new philanthropic organization appealed to Baker as a chance to make real changes in the state’s health system after a career spanning many aspects of modern health care.
An Illinois native, Baker got her start in the industry shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a master’s in urban planning. Growing up during a time of limited options for women, she helped create a domestic-violence shelter and a women’s center before responding to a Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin job ad in 1985.
“Women working on issues around agency and getting to decide their fate — at least around their health and wellbeing — was something that really resonated with me personally,” Baker said. “The personal becomes the political becomes the professional.”
Baker rose through the ranks to become associate executive director of Wisconsin Planned Parenthood.
In 1987 she was recruited for the role of CEO at the provider’s Connecticut chapter, which played a historic role in helping secure women’s right to contraception before the U.S. Supreme Court. After serving at Planned Parenthood for nine years, Baker took a post running Medicaid and Medicare programs at Oxford Health Plans, then became a national program director for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation.
When Baker was contacted to lead the CHF in 1999, she jumped at the chance.
“At the time I thought what a perfect blending of my work: having been a provider, understanding the pressures and the challenges of being a provider; being in managed care, understanding the payer side of the equation; and being in philanthropy at a national foundation.”
One of the foundation’s first priorities was to look at itself and make sure it was committed to equity within its own ranks, Baker said. An outside organization was brought in to do an audit on cultural and linguistic competency, then the mission was refined to emphasize diversity.
Under Baker’s leadership, the foundation then made it paramount to identify and fund projects that would address health disparities.
First up was oral health — only about 33 percent of children covered by Medicaid in Connecticut were getting dental care when the CHF began focusing on the issue in 2000. By 2013, Connecticut topped the nation in the percentage of poor children getting oral care.
Mental health was the focus of another effort in 2001, when CHF provided startup funding for Child First, a home-visit program that helps protect young children from the impact of trauma and adversity. CHF’s investment helped Child First grow to become a national program that has helped pioneer evidence-based trauma treatment for children.
“We took a chance on them,” Baker said. “That’s the role of philanthropy, to get that seed money.”
In recent years, the foundation’s mission has expanded to include helping launch community advocacy groups like Health Equity Solutions, which promotes efforts to address disparities.
As she prepares for her retirement in mid-2020, Baker looks back with satisfaction on the blend of the personal, political and professional in her career — though there is still much progress to be made on ending disparities.
“I’m blessed with my work here at the foundation and my past work with really allowing causes and important issues to be coupled with my life’s work,” Baker said. “I do recognize how blessed I am.”
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