The impact of the community resource specialist: Integrating a lay health worker to address social needs in Kaiser Permanente Washington clinics

Over 18 months, the KPWHRI LHS research team partnered with KPWA’s Mental Health and Wellness department to (a) engage a subset of clinics in practice facilitation to identify best practices for standardizing CRS integration and services, (b) build Epic tools to ensure a population management based approach to patient care by the CRS team, and (c) conduct a rigorous evaluation of the CRS role. This report shares key learnings from our evaluation.

KPWA members responded to our survey at two time points, baseline and 3 months follow-up, indicating significant social needs (Table 1). Respondents included a comparison group of patients who had social needs but no CRS encounters, patients with a single CRS encounter, and patients who had 2 or more encounters with a CRS.