Established as the Indiana Health Institute in 1985 by the Board of Trustees, the organization was renamed Eskenazi Health Foundation in 2011. The nonprofit was created to support the public hospital system for Marion County, which at the time was Wishard Memorial Hospital.
In 2011 the Foundation launched the Eskenazi Health Campaign to raise funds for a new hospital campus to replace the existing Wishard Memorial Hospital. The entire Wishard Hospital system was renamed in 2014. The campaign raised $87 million in total with nearly $5 million contributed by Eskenazi Health employees and $40 million provided by Sidney and Lois Eskenazi, making it one of the largest gifts ever made to a public hospital in the United States.
With the new hospital came an expanded mission, “Eskenazi Health Foundation inspires, energizes and promotes a vital, healthy Indianapolis community by providing strategic guidance and philanthropic resources to Eskenazi Health.”
In keeping with its mission, the foundation commissioned a study in 2018 to determine how their organization could best impact the Indianapolis community based on the city’s health needs. They determined that addressing social determinants of health, i.e., non-medical factors, was how the foundation could make the largest contribution to the community. As a result, the Foundation approved a $500,000 grant to Eskenazi Health in 2019 to integrate social determinants of health into clinical care.
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