KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) announced a $14.3 million healthcare innovation award to support an effort to deliver better healthcare at lower cost in four cities across the country, including Kansas City.
Communities Creating Opportunity (CCO), an affiliate of the PICO National Network, is partnering with Truman Medical Centers to address emergency room hot spots in Kansas City. Taking a joint approach of clinical intervention and grassroots community organizing, the two agencies will focus their efforts on 10 Kansas City zip codes with the highest rates of emergency room utilization. The goal is for Truman Medical Center to provide coordinated medical care to patients who are at highest risk of using the emergency room as primary care in an effort to demonstrate improved outcomes and a savings in cost of care to those patients.
With a new grant awarded to community organizations and Truman Medical Center, patients in those "hot spots" will receive managed healthcare so that they don't use the ER as their primary care.
CCO will work to organize faith communities, neighborhood groups, social service agencies and community stakeholders to create a system of natural supports around those patients to ensure that they are able to navigate the health delivery system and stay on track with their health improvement plan.
The project replicates the "hot spot" health-care model that was developed in Camden, NJ, under the leadership of Dr. Jeffrey Brenner and the PICO National Network. In the "hot spot" model, care teams visit residents in high-need, high-cost neighborhoods to improve their access to healthcare and manage their chronic conditions. The result is healthier residents, reduced emergency room visits and lower medical costs.
The communities included in the expansion are Allentown, PA, Aurora, CO, Kansas City, MO, and San Diego.
In the original, Camden-based "hot spot" model, a local PICO faith-based community organizing group organized residents of a low-income, high-rise apartment building with large numbers of seniors and disabled residents. The building was identified as one of the biggest healthcare cost "hot spots" in the city. Through their community organizing efforts, residents were able to win a nurse practitioner's office in their building, improving the medical care they receive and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary emergency room costs. The Camden project was organized by Camden Churches Organized for People, a sister federation of CCO in the PICO National Network.
"This award from the Innovation Center will give Kansas City the opportunity to be a witness that better care truly is cheaper care," said the Rev. Rayfield Burns, Director of Outreach Ministries at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church.
With a new grant awarded to community organizations and Truman Medical Center, patients in those "hot spots" will receive managed healthcare so that they don't use the ER as their primary care.
In the "hot spot" model, care teams would visit residents in neighborhoods to find out their needs and improve their access to healthcare.
"ER rooms are not meant to provide primary care for a person, it's for emergency use. And so, instead them having a place to go to where they can get primary care, where their records are kept, where they have people that keep in contact them. This is what this program will do," Burns said.
CMMI selected the "hot spot" model out of thousands of applications. Funding from the award will be used to support pilot projects designed to deliver better care to 2,425 high-cost, high-need Medicaid, Medicare and uninsured patients in four cities, and to create a learning network for healthcare providers and grassroots leaders in the participating cities. The beneficiaries will be people who suffer from complicated asthma, diabetes, hypertension and other chronic conditions but don't have regular access to a primary care practice to help manage their care.
The award is funded by the Affordable Care Act and will be administered and managed by Rutgers University Center for State Health Policy. PICO federations in each of the four cities will work with local healthcare partners to implement the projects.
The efforts are expected to lead to a projected savings of $67.7 million over three years and create more than 40 jobs. The savings could be reinvested in healthcare programs in low-income communities that increase access to high-quality primary care.
Truman Medical Center said they are working with the faith-based organizations and community organizations to determine how and where the money will be used.
Learn more at piconetwork.org.
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