The recent Blooming Day: Access to Care conference brought together leaders across the health and social care landscape to explore a pressing question: how do we build a better system for accessing care?

We were honored to welcome speakers including Chirlane McCray, Founder of ThriveNYC and Former First Lady of New York City; Dr. Chelsea Clinton; California Surgeon General Diana E. Ramos, MD, MPH, MBA; Chethan Sathya, MD, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Northwell Health; and many other influential leaders shaping the future of these systems.

The consensus was clear: treating illness alone is no longer enough. The future of care depends on proactively creating health through integrated, whole-person approaches that address social needs—and leveraging technology responsibly to do so at scale. Read on to see the highlights.

Integration Between Health Care and Social Care

A consistent theme throughout the day was the urgent need to move away from fragmented systems toward a unified ecosystem where healthcare and social care operate as one.

Achieving this requires breaking down systemic silos and focusing on true resolution—not just referrals. As Former First Lady of New York City Chirlane McCray emphasized:

“A need doesn’t disappear into a referral. It stays visible until resolved.”

Speakers reinforced that “whole-person care” is essential because health outcomes are shaped as much by social conditions as by clinical treatment. Housing instability, food insecurity, transportation, and social isolation are not peripheral issues—they are core drivers of health.

California Surgeon General Dr. Diana E. Ramos underscored this point:

“Housing instability, food insecurity, transportation barriers, digital access, social isolation… These are not side issues. They are core to the health issues.”

Chirlane McCray also highlighted the interdependence of the ecosystem:

“Healthcare cannot succeed without community organizations. Community organizations cannot scale without support from government and healthcare. These are not adjacent systems. They are interdependent.”

The Role of AI in Health Operations

Technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, was framed not as a substitute for human connection, but as an enabler of it. The idea of “scalable empathy” emerged as a central theme.

AI’s immediate value lies in reducing administrative burden and supporting providers so they can focus more fully on patients. As Dr. Diana E. Ramos noted:

“All of these AI-supported workflows can help teams focus on less administrative burden and more on human connection… patients are saying my doctor is actually now looking at me in the face and not looking at the screen.”

Beyond efficiency, technology also expands the capacity of the workforce. It enables community health workers and non-clinical teams to access better tools, insights, and coordination systems—allowing them to deliver higher-quality support at scale. Celina Sullivan, Senior Director, Program Management, Kaiser Permanente posited,

"What AI does is it reduces that cognitive burden of administrative burden. Things that we can have AI do for us so that everyone is working at the top of their scope and that they're happy."

At Blooming Health, we are building the infrastructure to make whole-person care real at scale through our Care Enablement Workflows (CEWs). Powered by agentic AI trained on years of real-world outreach data, CEWs proactively identify and systematically close both clinical and social gaps across critical care pathways:

• Social Needs Resolution (SDOH): Proactively screening for and resolving social barriers with closed-loop local resource connection to clear the runway for clinical care.

• Benefits Continuity: Mitigating administrative churn to drive up to a 300% increase in Medicaid renewal and continuous coverage retention, protecting plan PMPM revenue.

• Primary Care & Chronic Disease Control: Maximizing Annual Wellness Visits, boosting HEDIS/Star ratings, and securing clinical control for high-cost, high-risk populations.

• Maternal Health & Care Transitions: Driving compliance with prenatal/postpartum best practices and executing rapid post-discharge follow-ups to drastically lower 30-day readmissions.

By pairing culturally adaptive, multilingual outreach across 80+ languages with automated, real-time risk segmentation, Blooming Health proves that health equity and financial performance do not require trade-offs. We are so confident in our platform's ability to operationalize these pathways that we offer value-based contracting—going at-risk for achieving the concrete outcomes of your CEW.

Speak with our team to learn how you can move care forward, capture quality bonuses, and lower the total cost of care.