Hub & Spoke

LifeLong Medical Care Receives grant award that will save approximately $1 million

Yesterday LifeLong Medical Care (LifeLong) was awarded $1,109,231 as one of the Department of Health and Human Services’ first 26 Health Care Innovation Awardees. Made possible by the Affordable Care Act, the awards support 26 innovative projects nationwide that will save money, deliver high quality medical care and enhance the health care workforce.

Innovative is the appropriate word for LifeLong’s project, titled “Health Care Innovation Challenge: LifeLong complex care initiative to achieve the Triple Aim”. This award will allow the center to further integrate care and encourage healthy behavior, among 3250 seniors and other adults with disabilities who are Medicaid and dual Medicare/Medicaid-eligible beneficiaries. The goal is to reduce avoidable emergency room and hospital visits. The intervention will train adults with disabilities to support adoption of healthy behaviors among their peers and to encourage self-management, with the support of a team of nurse care managers. Improved care and better health for these high risk patients will lower costs with estimated savings of approximately $1 million.

Over the three-year period, LifeLong Medical Care’s program will train an estimated 60 health care workers, while creating an estimated 60 new jobs. These workers will include peer health coaches and nurse care managers who will facilitate integrated care for seniors and for low-income adults with disabilities. LifeLong will partner with Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living and the Alameda Alliance for Health to achieve program goals.

Congratulations LifeLong!!

La Clínica de La Raza Celebrates an Expansion of Quality Health Services With New State-of-the-Art Facility in the Monument Corridor

Our country recently celebrated the second anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, fondly referred to as Obamacare, which expands healthcare access for millions of individuals throughout the nation. There are plenty of positive changes in store for Californians due to the historic passing of this law. Among them are expansion opportunities for Community Health Centers, which provide quality primary health care services for all patients who are in need of care. A shining star in quality healthcare delivery is La Clínica de La Raza (La Clínica), which was founded in 1971 in response to the lack of health care services for residents of East Oakland.

La Clínica presently operates 29 medical, dental, and school-based clinic sites throughout Contra Costa, Solano, and Alameda counties. In 2011 La Clínica served 74,302 patients resulting in 361,261 medical, dental, podiatry, mental health, and health education visits.

As La Clínica continues to expand to meet the needs of a growing patient population, they maintain their vision to be a premier community health center, rooted in the concepts of wellness, prevention and patient-centered care.

La Clínica’s most recent expansion achievement is the opening of a new health center on 2000 Sierra Road, Concord, CA, which began serving patients in the beginning of March. They renovated and expanded a building purchased in 2009 in the Monument Corridor Community to create a 16,958 sq. ft., two-story, modern, state-of-the-art, health care facility.

All are welcome to join in a celebratory Open House for La Clínica’s new site on April 12, 2012 from 5:30-7:30. Location is 2000 Sierra Road, Concord, CA 94518.

Impact of expansion:

• Medical exam rooms increased from 6 to 12 with 2 new procedure rooms
• Dental operatories doubled from 6 to 12
• Expanded site from 5,000 to 16,958 sq. ft.
• Capacity expected to expand the number of patients served annually from 5,000 to close to 14,800 patients
• Ability to provide a “medical and dental home” for more Contra Costa residents (one-stop with comprehensive services under one roof)

Services Provided:

• Integrated Behavioral Health Services
• Case Management
• Chronic Disease Management
• Dental Care
• Family Medicine
• HIV Testing
• Health Education
• Immunizations
• Pediatrics
• Women's Health
• Community Programs
• Senior Services
• Optometry Services

Community Health Centers Launch Local Community Health Vote 2012

 

Community Health Centers in Contra Costa and Solano Counties are now offering patients the opportunity to register to vote and to receive information on the voting process as a service to the community.  As non-profit organizations, La Clínica de La Raza, Brookside Community Health Center, LifeLong Medical Care, and Planned Parenthood Shasta Pacific offer non-partisan voter registration and education as part of their commitment to help staff and clients become more engaged in their community. 

Why health centers are registering voters:

This effort is part of Community Health Vote 2012; a national initiative started in 2008 by the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) to establish permissible, nonpartisan voter engagement activities -- voter registration, voter education, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) in the low-income, medically underserved communities served by health centers across America.

Voter engagement is a natural extension of community health centers’ long time bi-partisan grassroots advocacy mission, and is consistent with the founding purpose of being leaders in improving the life and well-being of their communities.  By integrating voter registration into the daily activities and highlighting the importance of voting, health centers hope to help patients and communities be more informed and civically engaged.

How it works:

When patients check-in for their appointment, they have the opportunity to register to vote.  Completing a voter registration application takes just a few minutes, and the Health Center collects and submits completed forms to the Secretary of State’s office as a courtesy to patients and community members. 

The deadline to register to vote in the upcoming June Primary Election is May 21^st. To register, individuals must be a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old by Election Day, and a resident of California.

The importance of community health centers:

Brookside, La Clínica, LifeLong, and Planned Parenthood provide comprehensive, high-quality primary and reproductive health care services to residents of Contra Costa and Solano Counties. They offer services at affordable prices for the uninsured and medically underserved. According to 2010 Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) data, community health centers recorded approximately 280,000 patient encounters in Contra Costa and Solano Counties.

Why your vote matters!

1.  One vote can and often does matter in election outcomes
2. If you don’t vote, you give someone else the power to affect your life and the lives of your family.
3. If you don’t vote, you double the value of someone else’s vote.
4. When you vote, you send a signal to whoever gets elected to pay attention to you and the needs of your health center, especially when you are a health center patient or staff member.
5. Your vote is your voice in what happens in this country and the only person who can silence your voice is you.

Visit your local health center and register to vote!

The America We Want

Here's a riddle: What steadily shrinks for the first 39 years of its life and grows blazingly fast for the next 30?

(Sorry, gents - the answer's unfortunately not, as a general rule, "my hairline.")

Give up? 

It's the income gap in America - the difference in the percentage of the nation's wealth held by the richest 1% of the population and that held by everyone else.  Without getting into too many details, the more-than-somewhat-alarming fact of life in the USA these days is that if you're at the very top, you're sitting prettier than ever, and if you're not up there, things are looking grimmer.  

PBS had a great segment on this yesterday, which got us thinking.  

It got us thinking about what kind of America we Americans are making with the public policies we're enacting into law.  

Because regardless of what's to blame for the widening gyre that's blasting through the middle class, it seems that at least part of the answer to social inequality has to be wise federal legislation designed to bring us all together on common ground.

Case in point: Federal Healthcare Reform. Which, incidentally, just passed its anniversary. 

Congressman George Miller was in Concord this week to celebrate what the law's already provided to the sick and otherwise hard-to-insure.  He introduced Dr. Walker of CCHS (to whom he referred as his mentor on health policy) and a panel of regular people - from all walks of life - who're now able to access medical care that just months ago would have been totally out of reach.  

And then Mr. Miller said something so spot-on we wrote it down verbatim:

“On the horizon, there’s an insane idea that they can repeal this and replace it with a voucher. A voucher is the most expensive way to do healthcare… I don’t think that’s America. I don’t think it’s our future… As people find out more and more about this plan, I hope they will understand this is a generally great American idea.”

Right and right. Half of Congress is up in arms about how un-American it is to spend tax dollars on greater healthcare access for everyone. But America is what we make it through conscious policy choices. And the America that we here at the Consortium want to see isn't one where 1% of Americans have dream lives and the other 99% just scrapes by. 

One hundred percent of us deserve some basic things equally. Including health care.

In a society wedged further and further apart, Healthcare Reform honors the American ideal that we all have the right to a fair start.  

So, Mr. Miller, count community clinics in for the fight to keep Reform on the books. And thank you, as always, for your leadership!

Saving Medi-Cal will take more than optimism

Have you ever fallen a bit into the red ink with your personal finances? Sure, who hasn't.  Have you then, as a sort of family recovery plan, written a budget that puts you back in the black, but does so based in large part on the expectation that your boss will agree to raise your salary by $12 billion?  

If you answered yes to these questions, you may qualify for a job at the California Department of Finance, or perhaps in the governor's office itself, where the zeitgeist is a certain rose-tinted optimism about the generosity of the California public.  

Specifically, an optimism that in a June special election California voters will agree to extend about $12 billion in what were originally meant to be temporary tax increases.  Absent these tax extensions, the service cuts that Sacramento will have to make in order to balance the state budget will make drastically severe a quaint understatement.  

(As the comic to the right says, if you think the $1.7 billion in Medi-Cal cuts that Gov. Brown proposed in January are bad, consider what they'll be if he's got to find a dozen or so billion more dollars to squeeze out of state programs.)  

Actually, given that taxes do need to be raised somehow, the plan to bring tax extensions to the voters is a politically savvy one, given that it's harder for opponents in the Legislature to block something that's going to The People for approval.  Also, if a recent PPIC poll is any indication, it has at least a chance of succeeding.

To our mind, however, the PPIC poll demonstrates the possibility, but not the probability, of success.  If we - you, us, and all of the People Who Care about Our Community - want to save Medi-Cal and health centers from the chopping block, we've got to get out and vote in June.  

To that end, we at the Consortium are launching a major voter registration push, starting now.  More detail will follow - suffice to say that this will be our top advocacy priority in Spring 2011.  (BTW - if you're reading this and aren't registered - or have moved recently and need to re-register - follow this link to get the quick-and-easy process started.)  

But! We can't do it alone, and so we're writing to say: Join us! If you're an individual who can help out on the campaign to sign up voters, drop us a line and we'll put you to work! If you're an organization that's also doing voter reg. work this spring, let's figure out how we can work together to canvass the whole region.  

Future registered voters of Contra Costa and Solano Counties, we're coming for you! 

A Fond Farewell to Julie Freestone of CCHS

We healthcare wonks spend a lot of time talking about the importance of “systems of care.”  It’s a phrase that – a lot like “quality improvement” – is jarringly meaningless to the general public and should be banned from all of our talking points and press interviews.  

But the idea behind the jargon – that healthcare delivery should be coordinated, continuous, and easily navigable for all patients – is hugely important.  It’s they key to making the most of scarce healthcare resources and providing patients (particularly low-income patients who move between County and nonprofit providers) excellent care.  

Perhaps no one has done more to promote cooperation and integration of the healthcare delivery systems in Contra Costa than Julie Freestone at CCHS.  Working behind the scenes as the right-hand woman to Health Services Director Dr. Bill Walker, she has consistently bridged the gap between community clinics and the County’s health centers and helped keep everyone's eye on the ball: providing excellent care for vulnerable populations.

She has been a particular champion of healthcare systems in West County - serving on the board of directors of RYSE, and helping lead stakeholders in planning for implementation of the Healthy Richmond project.  

So we were pretty bummed, on behalf of community clinics and on behalf of ourselves, at the news of Julie's retirement from CCHS (her last day was Friday).  We'll miss working with such a committed advocate for the community.  

We do wish her the best of retirements, though if we had to guess, we'd guess she's not going far from the world of healthcare.  She is, after all, one of us: a wonk to the core.  

Cheers and congratulations from all of us at the Consortium, Julie! 

Waving Hi to a New Medi-Cal Plan

Guided by the time-tested adage that "week-and-a-half-old news is still news worth blogging about," we're interested in sparking a conversation here at Hub & Spoke about the recently-finalized 1115 Medicaid Waiver.  

As most of our readers will know, 1115 Medicaid Waivers are agreements between the state and federal governments that determine how California structures major parts of its Medi-Cal program.  It's a "waiver" because the agreement on Medi-Cal structure, while approved by the feds, deviates from the plain-vanilla federal template that the Medicaid program would otherwise default to.  

Here's how the LA Times framed the story:

The Obama administration on Tuesday approved a $10-billion plan to help California modernize and expand its Medicaid health insurance program for the poor, pushing the state to the forefront of the national effort to implement the new healthcare law.

The administration's much-anticipated decision to grant a so-called Medicaid waiver could ultimately help cover hundreds of thousands more Californians over the next five years. State and federal officials hope that will bolster efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of care provided to the state's poorest residents.

So, that said, the question for this community is this: how will the new 1115 Medicaid Waiver impact Contra Costa and Solano Counties?  

More specifically:

1. In Contra Costa County, given that a Health Coverage Initiative already exists - a facet of the previous 1115 Waiver - what will change for low-income adults under the new Waiver?
2. In Solano County, what are the opportunities presented by the new Waiver that the County might have the resources to take advantage of?  

We don't pose these questions rhetorically - we really do want to know.

So if you, dear reader, have insight into any of these mini-mysteries, please comment below and share the wisdom for our online community!

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth...5 Days of Cure

Have you ever walked by a sign that says, "free flue vaccine!" and thought to yourself, "Self, I've decided that the 5 minutes it would take me to get vaccinated today are way more valuable than the 5 days that I will spend next week coughing, lashed in sweat, and popping Advil like M&Ms as I fight to regain enough strength to return to work."

We're betting this actual internal monologue has not been a frequent refrain of yours this flu season.  And yet, if you haven't gotten vaccinated yet, you've been acting as if it were.  

That old chestnut, "an ounce of prevention..." should particularly ring true for those in the healthcare sector, and yet we know that about 1/2 of healthcare workers don't get vaccinated for the flu, which isn't so great.  

With plenty of flu shots to go around this season, and the CDC recommending that pretty much everyone get one, there's really no excuse not to, and again that's especially true for those working with vulnerable populations.  

Therefore: the Consortium is partnering with Contra Costa Health Services and the Contra Costa Child Care Council on a campaign to Put the Kibosh on Vaccination Procrastination.  (Don't worry, that's not the official slogan.)

Check out the site that CCHS set up for the "5 Minutes vs. 5 Days" campaign - it's got a ton of great materials to get the word out.  Among these: the rockin' rendition of "A Bad Case of Lovin' You" re-worked into "A Bad Case of Havin' the Flu" by none other than CCHS staff physician Alan Siegel and his band.  Here's the audio.  It's worth a listen, even if you've already got the shot. 

To the future, and beyond!

Mark your calendars, oh denizens of Richmond!  Saturday, September 25th is the When.  The What?  A community meeting for residents to weigh in on a weighty question: 

Assuming resources to make lasting improvements in health, safety, wealth, and education in Richmond, what do we envision for the future of our city?  

It's a provocative question.  It acknowledges that Richmond struggles in some major ways to provide its residents with opportunity.  

Yet implicit in the question is also the idea that we, the people and businesses of Richmond, love our fair city, and feel strongly that it's worth transforming into the place we believe it can be.

Of course, many readers probably didn't get beyond the "assuming resources" part of the question.  Without resources to make change, it can't happen.  And who's got resources these days?

Richmond does!  Or, at least, it probably will, thanks to what appears to be a massive (though as-yet undetermined) investment in the community by The California Endowment, a foundation aiming to make deep and sustained change in 14 cities throughout the state over the next decade.  

By focusing its investment in specific places, the Endowment's acting on the common-sense (and research-supported) idea that the health and well-being of a community depends on a broad range of factors that goes well beyond simply whether the community has access to hospitals and clinics.  Schools, safety on the streets, career opportunities, parks, streets, clean air - all these and more obviously impact the health of a city's residents.  

Perhaps most importantly, the Endowment has made clear that the most fundamental goal of its community investments will be to empower residents themselves with the skills and knowledge to push for improvements in their cities.  

In other words, the idea is to enable change from within, following the community's own priorities and naturally sustaining itself far into the future.  

The buzz-word for this is Systems Change.  The tool for this is Advocacy.  The people whose energy, creativity, and ideas we'll be relying on for this are the Youth of this city.  (For more, visit the Healthy Richmond website here.)

So the Endowment has spurred community members in Richmond to come together to map out a course for reinvigorating the city.  

A Steering Committee made up of stakeholders from the non-profit, business, and local government spheres formed about a year ago, and have been working diligently to develop the first draft of this roadmap.

Now it's time for the broader community to come to the table and jointly develop a plan.  

Which gets us back to September 25th, the next "community engagement" meeting - which will be held at 9:30am-2:00pm at Grace Lutheran on Barrett.  Lunch will be served, and space is limited, so call the number on this flyer to reserve your spot!

We plan to be there.  We hope you will, too!

Success Story

Just a quick post today with an update on the fantastic success of the "lemonade from lemons" program that community clinics and Contra Costa Health Services set up in the wake of the April, 2009, Board of Supes' decision to close Basic Health Care coverage for undocumented immigrants.

The 20-second version is that the program, which streamlines patients who would have been eligible for BHC into appropriate primary care at their choice of community clinic, has been operating at record levels of demand in 2010.  Click here for a fact sheet with more detail.  

And as we take the opportunity to point out every time we see a Supervisor, problems that popped up within the program's first year are starting to come under control due to strong efforts by community clinics and the County.  

A little while ago, the Consortium kicked off a series of meetings between La Clinica and CCHS providers aimed at creating a forum for working out patient transfer protocol - particularly complex when a patient is discharged from County care but still in need of specialty care services not offered by community clinics.  

One great development so far: CCHS instituted a policy to allow 30 days of post-hospitalization coverage for undocumented patients discharged from CCRMC.  This is huge.  

Also: telecommunications technology is coming to the rescue: La Clínica providers now have a CCHS provider contact list that allows them to connect directly with each other in a timely manner.  And CCHS providers have access to a messaging service at La Clínica where they can leave messages for clinic providers about prospective patients that will be handed-off fromone system to the other.

In short, things are Working.  And that, when it comes to the health care world, is a pretty big deal.