Signs of the Times #14: Community Health Care in Pursuit of the Common Good ft. Dr. James Gingerich, MD

Dr. James Gingerich is a family medicine doctor in Goshen, Indiana. James says he didn’t go to medical school to become a doctor, he went because he is passionate about community development and wanted to open an affordable health care center in Goshen that would build bridges across cultures. The Maple City Health Care Center fulfills the triple aim in health care of being high quality, low cost, and having high patient satisfaction, they are leading the state and in some cases the nation on all of these measures. But James says they’re not after the triple aim, he says the vision is to create a space where people engage with each other, come out of isolation and fragmentation and into shared space as a community and the result is they become healthier. The key ingredients to their success are eliminating a mentality of scarcity for patients and staff, fostering imagination, and bringing people together around story and food.