Med Ed Committee
It is not often that radical plans be made possible, especially in the healthcare field. Rebecca Onie, co-founder and CEO of Health Leads, spoke about the result of prescribing food to patients, outlandish at the time but utterly revolutionary. Two people have inspired her: advisor Dr. Tom Lee who helped her keep a positive outlook on venturing the frontier of healthcare reform and Dr. Jack Geiger who in 1965 founded one of the first two health centers in the US that prescribed food to patients.
The Office of Economic Opportunity who funded the clinic found out about this and was livid. They wanted the dollars to be used toward medical care. Dr. Geiger, tenaciously maintaining that malnutrition needs to be treated with food, invented the prescription for food. Several decades later, Health Leads reused that idea.
Dr. Jack Geiger and Dr. John W. Hatch during construction on the Delta Health Center, 1968
Only 10% of health outcomes are dictated by medical care. Patient social needs actually have a significant effect on their medical outcomes at a whopping 60%. A patient Carlos who was recently seen by a Health Leads site needed help with insulin administration, Multiple Sclerosis treatment, transportation services, and on top of that he couldn’t communicate in English because he was Spanish-speaking.
The medically complex, non-compliant patient is what doctors dreaded. This story is frequently heard by Health Leads. The real issue is that there is no food at home or other social issues that doctors don’t know how to address. Systematically addressing patient social needs seemed radical because doctors weren’t trained about this in medical school. There is a tradeoff between doing the right thing for your patients and recognizing the reality of the patients' situations. Electricity, heat, and food are just as important as putting in a stent in STEMI patients as fast as possible.
Fortunately, healthcare transformation task forces have been formed to extend better care to patients including low income populations. In the clinics that Health Leads works with, patients can be prescribed social needs and be connected to these resources. Carlos connected to a bilingual transportation company and secured vouchers for transportation. His doctor said that she can refer him to Health Leads instead of spending hours figuring out the root of his true medical issues— his social needs. Without this opportunity he would have been seen as a non-compliant patient.
Health Leads' biggest concern is that there is still a passive voice problem; something should be done about the social determinants of health. We need a system invested in whether a patient has the resources to maintain a healthy lifestyle instead of struggling to managing the totality of her health. Health Leads argues that the role in responsibility of the healthcare system is to break the cycle, ask their patients about their social needs, and help them access those solutions. This is where the radical and viable start to meet.
Reportedly, a growing number of healthcare systems are trying to address this issue. After working with hundreds of providers and helping tens of thousands of patients and help them access these needs, Health Leads found you have to commit to the following:
- Clinical integration by adding to your EMR a few basic social fields--like physical activity and financial resources-- to approach your clinical encounter with a wider picture to enhance your care.
- Having a dedicated workforce with the responsibility of addressing patient social needs.
- A resource database for things like income assistance based on patient population needs. Social workers, patient navigators, and community health clinics have access to this as well.
- There also needs to be consistent follow-up for successful resource connections.
- Finally we need data collection and analysis to have access to a different patient population. It shows that addressing patient social needs greatly influences patient medical outcomes.
No comments:
Post a Comment