Building a health system people deserve.
The convening brings leaders across health care, public health, education, technology, policy, and community and patient advocacy together to design the conditions under which whole-person health can become the standard of care in the United States.
The current system asks people to navigate fragmentation alone.
Whole-person health system transformation requires shared language, shared information flows, and simultaneous treatment of co-occurring conditions. It is technical, political, and relational work — and it cannot be done by any single profession, institution, or sector acting independently.
Across the United States, the systems responsible for health — financing, workforce training, care delivery, data infrastructure, and policy — built and continue to operate in pieces. The consequences are visible everywhere: preventable disease, deepened inequity, avoidable cost, and a population whose care is shaped more by the boundaries between systems than by the needs of the whole person.
The work of whole-person health system transformation will change that. This work will build care systems in which no aspect of a person's health and well-being — physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual, and environmental dimensions — is treated as separate from the rest, and no community is left to navigate fragmentation alone. This transformation requires shared health language, shared information flows, and simultaneous treatment of co-occurring conditions. This work is technical, political, and relational — and it cannot be done by any single sector, profession, or institution acting independently.
The Santa Fe Group is convening a network of leaders who agree there is public value in attaining fully integrated whole-person health. Leaders from across health care, public health, education, technology, policy, and community and patient advocacy are needed because the scale of the challenge — and the opportunity — demands a networked, coordinated, and sustained commitment to change. We come together not to advocate for any single profession or program, but to design the conditions under which whole-person health can become the standard of care in the United States.
Oral health enters this work with a body of strong evidence-supported case studies that illustrate what fragmentation costs and what integration can make possible. Societies that treat oral health as separate from medicine produce inequitable, fragmented, and costlier outcomes for their population. The mouth has been treated, financed, and taught as if it belonged to a different body — and the data on the negative outcomes that separation has produced are unambiguous. The mouth is biologically connected to systemic health. If we can build the systems, partnerships, and policy conditions that fully integrate oral health into whole-person care, we will have built much of the infrastructure that whole-person health requires across every other domain.
The Santa Fe Group believes the time has come to break down the silos between dental, medical, and mental health and social services. The policy and electoral landscape of 2026 and beyond creates an opportunity to improve the health infrastructure. Decisions made in the next few years will shape financing, workforce, education, and delivery systems for generations to come. We gather at this moment by intention — to align our goals, accelerate what works, and speak with a unified voice for the change we seek.
