National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) Annual Meeting 2017

Bridging Clinical Medicine and Population Health – Pittsburgh, PA

The NACCHO meeting this year included several sessions about social needs interventions in clinical settings, including:

Healthy Food Prescription Programs

There were two sessions that included presentations about food prescription programs:

• Lillie Rosen, Darla Bishop, and Amelia Peterson-Kosecki presented on DC’s produce prescription program, a partnership between DC Greens, DC Department of Health and AmeriHealth Caritas District of Columbia in which low-income DC residents at risk for diet-related diseases participate in monthly group wellness visits and receive produce prescriptions redeemable at local farmers’ markets.
• Rosalind Sayer Bello and Anna Brewster of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX presented on MD Anderson’s food prescription program, which is part of the Harris County BUILD Health Partnership, a multisector partnership formed to address food insecurity as a cause of obesity. More here.

RI Home Asthma Reduction Program - Connie Lo of the CDC talked about Rhode Island’s Home Asthma Reduction Program (HARP) in which a community health worker (CHW) and a certified asthma educator (AE-C) visit homes to provide education and deliver supplies to reduce home asthma triggers. In a pre-post analysis, HARP participants experienced a 76% reduction in asthma-related hospital and ED costs. For every dollar invested in the program, $1.33 were averted in reduced utilization. More here.

Community Health Teams and Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment- James Rajotte, Rhode Island Department of Health of Health, and Janine O’Donnell, RI Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals spoke about RI’s community health teams (CHTs), care teams comprised of at least one physician and two community health workers that serve as community extenders, connecting high risk patients with resources in their community, and which were developed as part of their CMMI funded State Innovation Model (SIM). More about this model here and here.

Maryland Comprehensive Primary Care Model- Jennifer Newman Barnhart, Ann Walsh, and Alice Bauman of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene presented on Maryland’s proposed comprehensive primary care model Care Transformation Organizations (CTOs) would administer care management support and services, including social services, to ambulatory health care provider practices to achieve better health and deliver higher quality health care to their patients. More about this model here.