Connect. Inspire. Lead.
The nation’s only essential conference
Track: Improving Population Health
- Optimizing Value-Based Care for Diverse, High-Risk Patients
- Using Mobile Units to Meet the Community’s Health and Social Needs
- Launching and Sustaining a Food-as-Medicine Program
- Providing COVID-19 Vaccine Access to an Underserved Community
- Creating a Novel Center for Health Equity and Advocacy Education
This session reviewed how to create and expand a comprehensive, multidisciplinary program to care for high emergency department (ED) utilizers and deliver high-quality coordinated care. Presenters explained how to choose patients for a high-intensity outpatient/home care program; set up a clinical team to care for these patients; and monitor success.
Presenter(s):
James Campbell, MD, MS
Chair, Department of Geriatrics
The MetroHealth System
The MetroHealth System has closed access gaps and improved health care outcomes for their patients by taking health services into the community where their patients live, work, and play. Attendees learned how this essential hospital capitalized on population health and community assessment data to identify novel ways to deploy mobile health units to meet the needs of underserved communities, as well as what successes and challenges the system faced.
Presenter(s):
Brook Watts, MD, MS
Senior Vice President, Quality
Chief Medical Officer, Community and Public Health
The MetroHealth System
Katherine Nagel, DrPH, MPH
CEO, MetroHealth Community Health Centers
The MetroHealth System
Attendees learned how a community partnership, led by association member Grady Health System, developed a comprehensive food prescription program to mitigate chronic disease and food insecurity. Presenters shared key lessons learned about evaluation planning, implementation, and reporting, as well as tools and recommendations for growing and sustaining meaningful partnerships and patient-centered social determinants of health interventions. Presenters also highlighted the inpatient component of the program, which provides home-delivered, medically tailored meals, and employee wellness efforts.
Presenter(s):
Katie Mooney, MPH
Senior Manager of Population Health and Community Benefit
Grady Health System
Leslie Marshburn, MBA
Executive Director, Strategy and Population Health
Grady Health System
Essential hospital NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst operates in a highly populated community, where the majority of residents are low-income, low-literacy immigrants living in multigenerational homes. In March 2020, Elmhurst was at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with one of every six patients diagnosed with the virus. However, when vaccines became available in early 2021, the hospital realized its online COVID-19 vaccination appointment system was neither easy to navigate nor accessible to its community. In response, the hospital partnered with local community-based organizations to improve vaccination rates; these efforts led to an extraordinary vaccination rate of 99 percent for the hospital and its surrounding community.
Presenter(s):
Amy Harris, MS, MPA
Associate Executive Director
NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst
Michelle Lam, MBA
Associate Director
NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst
Health care professionals have a unique vantage point from which to observe and speak to the social, economic, and political factors that determine health, but they often lack the training to do so. Attendees learned how one public teaching hospital created its Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy. Through seven educational programs, the center seeks to better equip health care professionals, including physicians and allied health professionals, to be advocates for health equity and to become leaders for health equity in safety net and other health care systems caring for marginalized patient populations.
Presenter(s):
Danny McCormick, MD, MPH
Co-Director, Center for Health Equity Education and Advocacy
Cambridge Health Alliance
About Our Tracks
Sessions focused on solutions to current public policy and financial issues unique to essential hospitals. Past topics have included Medicaid supplemental payments, waiver initiatives, telehealth policy, graduate medical education, and state-level 340B Drug Pricing Program policies.
Sessions showcased new and promising programs that demonstrate groundbreaking initiatives in caring for vulnerable populations and ensuring equitable access to high-value care. Sessions focused on innovative programs that integrate clinical practice into the health system’s overarching mission and goals, quality improvement, managing operations during a pandemic or other public health threat, and patient-centered care.
Sessions targeted the hard and soft skills necessary to lead complex and evolving hospitals and health systems dedicated to serving their communities. Sessions focused on lessons learned from leadership experiences and the importance of strategic partnerships, combating structural racism, culture change, reducing employee burnout, and climate resilience.
Sessions offered expertise on improving the health outcomes for a group of individuals by engaging internal and external stakeholders to serve community needs. Sessions focused on leveraging policies and procedures at the hospital, local, state, and federal levels to support community well-being; innovative financing models; cross-sector partnerships; and aligning community benefit investment with population health efforts. Programs and practices that address social determinants of health and ultimately aim to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care were highlighted.
Questions?
Contact us at events@essentialhospitals.org
America’s Essential Hospitals
401 Ninth St. NW, Suite 900,
Washington, DC 20004
202.585.0100