Tag: accountable community of health

Project Selection Process

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As more details on expectations for Medicaid Demonstration Projects trickle down from HCA we are continually refining our project selection process in hopes of making it accessible to all community members interested in participating, while also focused enough to get us ready for the heavy amount of planning we’ll have to do in a very short time. We thank you all for continued feedback throughout this process. 

At the March Leadership Council meeting we announced our updated timeline for project selection, which you can view on this one pager. In summary, we are requesting a Letter of Interest from community organizations interested in collaborating on one of the optional Medicaid Demonstration Projects by May 15.



Download LOI Form


Watch LOI Webinar

Our Board Evaluation Team will review those letters and invite selected proposals to present at a public Community Project Showcase event, where organizations “pitch” their projects in a short “Shark Tank” styled event. The Evaluation Team and audience members will evaluate project proposals against pre-determined criteria, and from there invite selected projects to continue on to join a planning team and prepare the full application. 

Alison’s slides from this presentation can be downloaded here. Though we did not have time to go over them in the meeting, this slide deck includes updated overviews of the Medicaid Transformation Projects from the most recent draft of the toolkit. 
 

BHT Community Strategy Development Timeline

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Throughout 2016, we hosted multiple series of community feedback sessions where we worked to learn and build out our community’s perspective on regional health improvement strategies.

January Regional Gathering:
In January we hosted our first iteration of Community Linkage Mapping, an exercise we have been building and refining throughout the year where participants inventory their organizational relationships in an effort to build a “map” of our health system. Also in this session, participants broke out into dynamic Idealized Design feedback sessions in each of our Priority Areas.

February/March Community Linkage Mapping:
At the end of February/Early March we hosted an expanded second round of Community Linkage Mapping and Idealized Design. We spent the months of March and April synthesizing the information and building out our community strategy maps. A few voiced themes from those sessions included the need to:

  • Foster a culture of self-care and personal responsibility
  • Build on opportunities for communities to nurture grassroots health
  • “Coordinate the Coordinators”
  • Build a common platform to ease information sharing and access
  • Balance coordinated decision-making across the region, while honoring self-determination in local communities

Summary of May Leadership council meeting:
In May we debuted the first draft of our community strategy maps, which represent a snapshot of the feedback we heard in the previous sessions. After, we announced the formation of Community Action Strategy Teams which would meet throughout the summer to validate and expand the identified strategies and decide on appropriate indicators measure. Each was chaired by a BHT Board Member. From June-September, we hosted feedback sessions and conducted individual outreach using the Results Based Accountability framework. The resulting updated Community Strategy Maps for Social Determinants and Population Health were debuted in September.

In October, we began working with the Spokane Regional Health District Data Center to execute a process for finalizing our Community Linkage Map. We will be surveying organizations across the region, asking them to identify their organizational relationships, which we will be able to visually inventory in a “Network Analysis” (example). This network map will help us visually represent where there are gaps of care in our health system. The map will live on the BHT website available for the public to view and explore. We will gather survey responses until December 31st, and expect to have the analysis complete in 2017.  

When this map is completed, we intend to bring back this systems level view of our region to our Community Strategy Action Teams to validate our strategies and prioritize areas of impact. 

MEDICAID WAIVER APPROVED!

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As you can see, staff was pretty excited about this announcement…

After months and months on the edge of our seats, we were thrilled to hear on Monday that CMS and Health Care Authority have come to principle agreement on the Medicaid 1115 Demonstration Waiver. The five-year demonstration provides up to $1.1 billion of incentives for delivery system reform and $375 million to support critical services for Apple Health clients over five years. 

Significant stakeholder and community input informed the four goals of this demonstration plan:

  • Reduce avoidable use of high-cost services such as acute care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and nursing home facilities.
  • Improve population health, with a focus on prevention and proactive management of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, pediatric obesity, smoking, mental illness, and substance abuse for Apple Health clients.
  • Accelerate Medicaid payment reform to pay providers for better health outcomes.
  • Bend the Medicaid cost curve below national trend.

The specific terms and conditions will be negotiated over the coming months, so it will still be some time before those dollars start flowing to health improvement projects across the state, but we’ve just leaped a major hurdle on the track to a Healthier Washington. 

You can read more from the Governor’s media release here. 

Social Determinants of Health Strategy Map

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DRAFT – Work in progress

After a summer of focus groups, we are thrilled to release an updated draft of our Community Action Strategies Map! Thank you to all who contributed feedback in one of our sessions. 

A reminded this document is very much in draft form. We intend for these maps to be a living document, that we regularly return to and update as needs and priorities change. Today, this map represents a snapshot of the most prominent themes we heard throughout the focus groups.

Background

There are many factors that lead to whole-person health and most of those factors happen outside of a doctor’s office. We have identified 6 target factors in the Social Determinants of Health: Housing, Income Stability, Food, Transportation, Education, and Community Support

Originally, the ACH Leadership Council, Social Determinants Subgroup worked on the strategy mapping for these 6 areas collectively, but it was very apparent that we needed a more systematic approach where we could engage the regional experts in targeted discussion. In August, ACH staff and SDOH workgroup co-chair Pam Tietz participated in a Results Based Accountability training hosted by THEZONEPROJECT, which presented a fortuitous opportunity to reform the workgroup into targeted community “turn-the-curve” work sessions. We split the 6 social determinants into separate work groups and asked Leadership Council members to invite any pertinent individuals or organizations to join the meeting. Our goal is to engage as many people and organizations as possible for feedback and input.

Greg Knight, the Executive Director of Rural Resources and BHT Board member co-chair of this group helped coordinated outreach sessions in rural counties. Individual outreach is still being conducted for additional organizations, and the strategy map will continue to expand. 

Through these workgroups, the group identified over 160 key partners and organizations that should be included in this work.

To date, the ACH Project Team has engaged with over 65 individuals in various work groups and outreach.

September Leadership Council Recap

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ACH Updates

 
This meeting featured updates on our Community Action Strategy Teams, our ACH Pilot Project, and Governance Structure. We have slides from these presentations available here.
 
We were thrilled to share out our updated Strategy Maps for Social Determinants of Health and Population Health. Our Community Action Strategy Teams were meeting all summer to help us understand our community’s perspective on regional health needs, and identify goals, metrics, and strategies for moving the needle. These maps represent a snapshot of the conversations we’ve heard. A huge thank you to all of you who donated some of your summer to these meetings. These maps are very much work in progress, and we intend for them to be living documents that are continuously updated as the work progresses and priorities change.
 
Another big update was the announcement of our first selected ACH Pilot Project. Starting in October, we will begin design sessions in Ferry County around a Jail Transition pilot to connect folks transitioning out of the Ferry County Jail and their families to stabilizing services. 
 

BHT and ACH Governance

 
We wrapped up the meeting with a presentation on the ACH and BHT governance structure. If you haven’t already, make sure you take a look at our Governance Policy which explains in-depth the role of our Board, Leadership Council, and Health Champions and how they intersect.
 
We are currently recruiting for 4 open seats on our Board, and need your help finding the right people to fill those positions. Click here to see our board recruitment packet, which includes more information about the commitment and an application. To apply, you must submit the application, your resume, and a letter of support from a current BHT Board Member or ACH Leadership Council Member, by Friday October 14th at 5pm.
 

Leadership Council – Community Commitment

 
We are also working to update and clean up our Leadership Council list. If you can’t quite remember what you signed up for when you joined the Leadership Council, take a minute to read through our recruitment packet. We will be asking all Leadership Council members to renew their Community Commitment to the ACH. Rather than deal with the hassle of asking all of you to print/sign/scan these letters to us, we will be sending out a DocuSign to each Leadership Council Member Organization with a request for contact information of each person who should receive ACH updates. Stay tuned…and as always feel free to email hadley@betterhealthtogether.org with any questions.