Project to Address Patient Risk

Several organizations recently launched a Kresge Foundation funded project with a grant award for $800,000. The grant funding will be used to measure and capture patient risks at health centers in terms of both clinical and non-clinical factors to include social, environmental, and economic factors that influence an individual’s health.

The organizations involved in the launch include the National Association of Community Health Centers, Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations, the Oregon Primary Care Association, and the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF).

The grant will support the three year project to create, implement, and promote a standardized health risk assessment protocol that will help health centers better understand and manage their patient populations.

The partners will develop services and community partnerships, identify factors that are driving higher healthcare costs along with poorer health outcomes, and create more appropriate risk adjustments when operating under value or performance-based payment systems.

This project comes at a critical time, as payments are becoming more increasingly based on measures of health quality rather than the volume of services provided. However, current quality measures do not account for the fact that many differences in health are related to the social determinants of health such as poverty, jobs, education, and housing, availability of healthy foods, neighborhood safety, geographic isolation, and social exclusion.

“This protocol will be a major advance in integrating knowledge of social determinant-related risks with health centers practices as health centers become more systematic in understanding the root causes of their patients’ illnesses,” said IAF Chairman and Senior Futurist Clem Bezold.

According to Kresge’s David Fukuzawa, who directs the Foundation’s Health Program, “Creating a standard patient risk-assessment protocol will certainly be helpful to the community health center sector to transition community health centers toward a more population health focused-approach”

If health centers or health organizations currently use a patient risk assessment tool and would like to share it with others, please contact Michelle Jester at mjester@nachc.org or call 202-331-4609.