By DePaul Healthy Trailblazer Journal 8B reporters | Dr. Keith Leaphart is achieving a childhood goal: to make society better.

He learned as a child that many people he knew didn’t have an easy time getting health care. “I wanted to figure out ways for me to make a difference to help these people,” he says.

He now works at Jefferson as enterprise executive vice president. In his role, he is working to improve community health throughout the Philadelphia region. “My goal … is to make sure that Jefferson is a place where everyone who walks in the door feels like they belong there, that you’re treated fairly, that you’re treated equitably, that you know Jefferson is a place that cares,” he says. Jefferson has 17 hospitals, more than 50 outpatient sites, and five urgent care centers.

To Dr. Leaphart, health care is more than a trip to the doctor’s office or hospital to treat a medical problem.

“There’s a lot of stuff that happens outside the walls of the hospital,” he says. “They say around 20 to 30 percent of one’s health is your access to health care or your genetics. The other 70 percent are the things that are in our environment, our access to healthy foods, our housing conditions, the stresses that we live with.” Dr. Leaphart says these factors are called “the social determinants of health.”

Jefferson’s “mission is to improve lives,” he says. “Improving lives is really something that is broad, but also specific. We’re going to be investing deeply in the community.”

He says he “really jumped at the opportunity [at Jefferson] because I thought I could make a difference … for a lot of people.”