After months of examining evidence and learning about successful initiatives, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America has issued a report that calls for a realignment of national health funding priorities.

The report, Time to Act: Investing in the Health of Our Children and Communities (120 pages, PDF), highlights the ways in which external factors such as the built environment, poverty, and access to education affect individual health. To improve the nation's overall health, the report urges the public, private, and social sectors to invest more in efforts to address the non-medical causes of poor health, with a focus on increasing access to early childhood development programs, revitalizing low-income neighborhoods, and broadening the mission of healthcare providers beyond medical treatment.

Specific recommendations made by the commission include funding enrollment for all low-income children in quality early childhood development programs by 2025; supporting an integrated approach to revitalizing communities, with incentives and performance measures to encourage collaboration; adopting non-clinical "vital signs" such as employment, education, and housing as part of any assessment of a population's health; and connecting patients to resources and services that can help them realize better health.

"To achieve a healthier America, we must change our approach to investing in health to affect the actual determinants of health, not just the consequences of ill-health," said commission co-chair Alice M. Rivlin, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "If carried out, these recommendations will build a foundation of lifelong health for generations to come."

"As a nation, we have a responsibility to do right by society's most vulnerable members and by our future generations," said Robert Wood Johnson Foundation president and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. "We must join forces to foster a culture of health in which everyone—regardless of where they live, their race or ethnicity, or how poor or wealthy they may be — has the opportunity to lead a healthy life."