Safety-Net Populations: Innovative Ideas

Margaret Laws MPP, Director for California Healthcare Foundation’s Innovations for the Underserved, wants to see individuals, organizations, and companies develop new ideas so that underserved population in California and elsewhere will be able to afford healthcare. She was speaking recently at the Partners HealthCare Connected Health Symposium held in Boston October 23-24, 2013.

Since the cost for healthcare often isn’t affordable or sustainable, one in five Californians have no insurance, including one out of every three Latinos. Although the Affordable Care Act will insure millions of uninsured in the next few years, there is little in the law to stop the spiraling cost of care.

As she explained, new devices and expensive diagnostic tools and procedures that contribute to the rising cost of care are often being used instead of well tested and lower cost approaches to care, even when it has been proven that the lower cost approaches are effective.

Furthermore, the safety net system needs to address the payment reimbursement challenge, adopt technology to lower costs, address how to best incorporate the use of technology into the workflow, examine how to develop user interface and usability of technology into the aging safety-net population, and run pilots that will provide evidence that the new concepts will work.

The underserved program supports retail or express clinics but has also launched a pilot using kiosk-based care for diagnosis and screening. The program is working with the multidisciplinary Stanford University Program to encourage innovation in devices and technologies to improve care and lower costs.

In addition, the California’s Healthcare Foundation has funded the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP) a non-profit organization to address the care and issues involving healthcare’s safety net population. The objective is to provide primary care to low-income and uninsured patients through a collection of community clinics, health centers, and hospitals. However, specialty care is not provided.

Another program in the state, the Specialty Care Safety Net Initiative (SCSNI) a collaborative effort with the University of California and 38 safety net clinics uses telemedicine to address specialty care. SCSNI connects safety net clinics across the state with specialists at the University of California Schools of Medicine at Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco to provide specialist consultations to low income and underserved patients.

For more information, go to www.chcf.org/programs/innovations.