HJBR Nov/Dec 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  NOV / DEC 2022 23 a social worker. The health system part- nered with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center and Delgado Community College to train local musicians and artists as CHWs. This unique program received an award under Johnson & Johnson’s Health Equity Innova- tive Challenge for “generating solutions to help close racial health and mortality gaps.” Avis Gray, a registered nurse and health equity leader who works with CHWs at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, contrasted these prevention efforts with the time she spent working in Charity Hospital’s emergency department where she became shocked by how sick people were when they arrived for care. “Why are people sick and dying of life- style diseases?What is going on upstream?” she recalled thinking. Describing individu- als who currently take three blood pressure medications, Gray cautioned against merely “medicating on top of medicating” and emphasized the importance of upstream interventions like nutrition education. Poet Sunni Patterson and musician Nay- dja CoJoe are two CHWs working to build trusting relationships that empower indi- viduals to better manage their health. “Our role is really to give some kind of hope, a word of encouragement, of some joy that enables us to take better care of ourselves,” Patterson said. CoJoe described how CHWs can help prevent avoidable hospitalizations by iden- tifying patients who might otherwise be dis- charged to homes during the hottest days of August without electricity and air con- ditioning. “It’s 99 degrees with 100 percent humidity,” she said. “If you have high blood pressure and diabetes, that can put you into complete distress mode.” Both CHW programs at Ochsner and LCMC Health refer patients to community resources through a real-time technology platform offered by Unite Us. The platform allows referring healthcare providers to receive follow-up notifications so they can ensure the patient’s actual needs were met. The tool also allows stakeholders to quickly identify and fill gaps in needed community resources. Both health systems said they plan to track this and other data to improve the effectiveness and value of their CHW interventions. “We can truly wrap services around the individual, instead of asking individuals to try to self-navigate through complex systems in order to get the resources they need to thrive,”said Unite Us Regional Net- work Director Mara O’Brien Hahn. Today, Louisiana Medicaid MCOs not only hire their own CHWs to work on their internal clinical teams, but they’re also part- nering with medical providers to include more CHWs in a variety of healthcare set- tings, investing in scholarships to trainmore CHWs and relying on CHWs to help prevent pregnancy-associated deaths. AmeriHealth Caritas Louisiana Market Chief Medical Officer RodneyWise said his company has internally relied on CHWs to serve patients since 2014, with plans to expand statewide next year. “We’re always looking for new partners with anything like this in our value-based or shared-savings programs,”he said, as he mentioned the dif- ficulty of keeping in touch with some enroll- ees by telephone and expressed a desire to partner with large clinics and hospitals to engage members sooner at the site of care. Humana Healthy Horizons recently agreed to fund two additional CHWs in LCMC Health’s program at New Orleans East Hospital with a focus on maternal health outcomes. Shelly Gupta, MD, chief “Louisiana Medicaid MCOs not only hire their own CHWs to work on their internal clinical teams, but they’re also partnering with medical providers to include more CHWs in a variety of healthcare settings.”