Dr. Eric Whitaker on how Black creativity can change lives

Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2023 with our third-annual Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor JinJa Birkenbeuel turns the spotlight to Dr. Eric E. Whitaker, executive chairman and founder of Zing Health, a physician-led insurance company.

Here, Dr. Whitaker shares his thoughts on the making of Project Brotherhood: a Black Men’s Clinic.

On my first day at work in a Chicago community health center, I saw 16 patients. Physicians in public health clinics are busy, and I struggled to keep even sketchy case notes. Yet when I went back to update my patient charts, it was as if I had seen the same person 16 times. Every one of them had hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes. I had signed up for this duty to research Black men’s health, and I was learning that to make a difference I would have to be creative.

In 1998, the life expectancy for Black men in this South Side neighborhood was said to be 14 years shorter than for the rest of the city, and even today health disparities are stark. Our small, overbooked clinic had to reach out to close the gap—many Black men would not even set foot in a waiting room and show themselves as vulnerable. This health inequity set me on a lifelong, entrepreneurial path to give people longer and better lives. I keep returning to these strategies at Zing Health in organizing and marketing Midwest health plans. At 63rd and Woodlawn, though, I started with free haircuts.

Cook County Hospital, which ran the health center, found seed money to organize a male-friendly space at the front of the building, and to recruit social workers to address what we now call the social determinants of health. One of my patients told me, “Doc, one of the best things you can do for my health is to get me a job.” He was right—employment has a salutary effect on well-being, financially and as a matter of self-worth. A drop-in barbershop on Thursday afternoons could groom Black men for interviews, with social workers on hand to coach them on resumes and online job-hunting tactics. A barbershop is a social center—a place to learn and form relationships. Maybe we could earn enough trust to bring them to the back of the clinic for medical appointments.

Project Brotherhood: a Black Men’s Clinic enlisted Black doctors who could relate to what patients experienced in the emergency room, where pain complaints were minimized or treated as drug-seeking. The physicians also joined our focus groups and client discussions around men’s health and men’s responsibilities, participating not as doctors but as peers who had gone through similar trials. In one group, I was the only one in the room who had not seen a man hit his mother. The group sessions and activities outside the neighborhood helped us connect with young men who didn’t think they would see adulthood, and older men who still didn’t see themselves as adults.

In attracting new patients and engaging them in their well-being, Project Brotherhood was a model program. At medical conferences and on “60 Minutes,” we evangelized about its collective spirit. But with many of its clients on Medicaid or paying what they could, Project Brotherhood was hard to replicate outside of a publicly funded medical center.

Still, my corporate ventures try to attack hard problems with the same energy. As a private insurance plan, Zing Health aims to make care affordable for a population with costly chronic illnesses. But if its members trust the medical system and commit themselves to better health, they make their conditions manageable.

Getting people comfortable with their care is still an issue. Only one in five African Americans in the Medicare program choose a private Medicare Advantage plan; walking them through the details of a chronic special-needs plan can be a three-hour process. So, it’s important to have neighborhood outreach and community health workers to meet people where they are. One-third of our members call us every month—making appointments, arranging transportation, looking for medical advice—and those are healing relationships.

Sometimes you walk down crumbling sidewalks past vacant lots and find a rose growing out of the concrete. Project Brotherhood showed me how Black men’s pain is the source of their renewal. I’m inspired by Black Chicagoans and their ability to transform despair and struggle into beauty and art. Our community faces a lot of morbidity and death, and it makes me want to find solutions. That’s all you can ask of the creative impulse.