Financial Sustainability for Complex Care Models Serving Low-Income Patients: a New Role for Philanthropy.

This paper shares lessons learned from providing planning and technical assistance to the grantees of the Merck Foundation's 5-year, $16 million initiative, Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care, designed to improve access to high-quality diabetes care and reduce disparities in health outcomes among vulnerable and underserved U.S. populations with type 2 diabetes. Our objective was to co-create, with the sites, financial sustainability plans to sustain their work once the initiative had ended and to improve and/or expand it to serve more patients, better. Financial sustainability is an unfamiliar concept in this context, largely because the current payment system inadequately compensates providers for the value their care models provide to patients and to insurers. Our assessment and recommendations are based on our experiences working with each of the sites on sustainability plans. The sites were diverse in terms of their approaches to clinical transformation and integration of SDOH interventions, geography, organizational context, external environment, and populations served. These factors influenced the sites' capacity to build and implement viable financial sustainability strategies and the eventual plans themselves. Philanthropy has a critical role in investing in providers' capacity to develop and implement financial sustainability plans.

Integrating Social And Medical Data To Improve Population Health: Opportunities And Barriers.

Recent efforts in medical settings to identify social determinants of health have focused primarily on screening for the purpose of improving care for individual patients and getting standardized data into electronic health records (EHRs). Relatively little attention has been given to processes needed to extract data on social determinants of health out of medical records with adequate validity and efficiency to facilitate analysis across individual encounters to inform population health efforts relevant to the health care sector. In this article we describe the rationale for extracting data on social determinants of health from EHRs, including the potential influence of aggregated data on quality improvement activities and health care payment reform. We then discuss opportunities and challenges to pulling these data from EHRs to enable population-level applications, focusing on the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, as one potential data aggregation resource. Standardizing methods for extracting data on social determinants of health from EHRs will require understanding current challenges and refining existing translation tools.

The role of community health centers in assessing the social determinants of health for planning and policy: the example of frontier New Mexico.

This article examines the experience of a frontier-based community health center when it utilized the Tool for Health and Resilience in Vulnerable Environments (THRIVE) for assessing social determinants of health with a local health consortium. Community members (N = 357) rated safety, jobs, housing, and education among the top health issues. Community leaders integrated these health priorities in a countywide strategic planning process. This example of a frontier county in New Mexico demonstrates the critical role that community health centers play when engaging with local residents to assess community health needs for strategic planning and policy development.

The diffusion of youth-led participatory research in urban schools: the role of the prevention support system in implementation and sustainability.

This article discusses the dissemination of a process of youth-led participatory research in urban secondary schools within the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation (ISF) developed in collaboration with the CDC and its university partners (Wandersman et al. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(3-4) 2008). The focus here is on the development of the Prevention Support System with respect to general and innovation-specific capacity building. The specific process under study involves youth-led needs assessment and research to inform the planning of prevention programs and policies to address students' health and developmental needs. The article first briefly describes the youth-led research process, its potential benefits, and a case example in two urban secondary schools. It then describes challenges and responses in providing support for the diffusion of this model in 6 secondary schools. The settings are urban public schools with a majority of students of color from diverse ethnic groups: Asian-American, Latino, and African-American. This project constitutes a collaborative partnership with a university school of public health and community-based organizations (CBOs) to build capacity for long-term, sustainable implementation of this innovative process within the local school system. The perspectives of the university-based researcher and the CBO partners on the development and effectiveness of the Prevention Support System are presented.