NashvilleHealth’s story begins with a paradox. In 2015, Nashville was rising rapidly as one of America’s most dynamic economic engines, an “it city” defined by innovation, creativity, and growth. Yet beneath this momentum lay an alarming truth: Nashville’s residents were among the least healthy in the nation. Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D., recognized that the city’s prosperity could not be sustained unless the health of its people improved. He founded NashvilleHealth to confront this challenge head-on and to build a healthier, stronger Nashville through coordinated, data-driven community action.
From the start, NashvilleHealth positioned itself as the city’s collaborative health backbone – a convener, architect, and facilitator that mobilizes partners across clinical, academic, nonprofit, civic, and business sectors. This unique role is what sets NashvilleHealth apart. While many organizations address specific health issues, NashvilleHealth tackles the systemic nature of poor health by aligning entire networks toward measurable, collective improvement.
At the heart of NashvilleHealth’s innovation is its commitment to actionable data. NashvilleHealth identified early that Nashville lacked a citywide health data infrastructure. Nashville had no unified, current, or reliable way to understand the true health of its residents. In 2019, NashvilleHealth led the development of the city’s first comprehensive Community Health and Well-being Survey in over two decades and partnered with Belmont University to launch a groundbreaking cross-sector data repository. This database now provides Nashville with unprecedented insight into local health disparities, insight now used to target interventions where they are needed most.
NashvilleHealth’s leadership is also evident in its pioneering approach to multi-sector collaboration. The Nashville Wellness Collaborative, first convened by NashvilleHealth in 2022, unites more than 20 organizations working simultaneously on clinical care, food access, transportation, workforce development, and more.
Special initiatives highlight the organization’s breadth and influence. NashvilleHealth and the Nashville Wellness Collaborative coordinated the development of Nashville’s first Wellness Opportunity Zone, designated by Mayor Freddie O’Connell in early 2024, aimed at blending hyperlocal data with collaborative action to create replicable community health improvements, first by addressing hypertension disparities in North Nashville through the Heart of Nashville/Operation Pulse initiative. By integrating medical care with social supports, NashvilleHealth demonstrates how community-rooted partnerships can measurably improve chronic conditions that burden residents and the economy alike.
NashvilleHealth also led Nashville’s COVID-19 After Action Report, making Nashville one of the country’s earliest cities to conduct a rigorous review of its pandemic response and earning national recognition, including an invitation to share findings at the White House. Additional efforts including a Workforce Wellness Report developed in 2024 in partnership with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and a maternal and infant health collaboration showcase the organization’s capacity to convene diverse partners around health and workforce challenges which impact Nashville’s economy and its ability to thrive.
Through every initiative, NashvilleHealth’s philosophy remains constant: healthcare is not the same as health. With 80% of health outcomes shaped by non-medical factors, NashvilleHealth works across transportation, nutrition and food access, housing, environment, workforce, and community infrastructure to address the true drivers of wellbeing. The NashvilleHealth roadmap for action – identifying data-backed indicators, convening stakeholders, aligning resources, implementing collaborative action projects, measuring outcomes, and providing communities with sustainable assets to ensure future health – promotes community-wide progress.
Looking ahead, NashvilleHealth envisions a future where every Nashvillian can achieve a life of health and wellbeing, and where Nashville becomes one of the healthiest and most economically resilient cities in the nation. By producing pioneering datasets, scaling demonstration projects, informing policy, and elevating Nashville as a national model, NashvilleHealth aims to reshape how cities across the U.S. invest in health as a foundation of prosperity.
NashvilleHealth sees what Nashville can be – a thriving city powered by healthy people – and is leading the way to make that vision a reality.
