Taking care of population health is a goal toward which hospitals and health systems are starting to make progress, usually through leveraging data. At Dallas-based Children’s Medical Center, leveraging IT in combination with finding unlikely community partners has played an important part in the hospital’s population health efforts.
In a Nov. 5 presentation at the Becker’s Healthcare Annual CIO & CEO Strategy Roundtables, held in Chicago, Peter Roberts, executive vice president for population health and network development at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas shed light on the institution’s financially sustainable population health strategy through its “ecosystem of uncommon partners.”
Who is the health system partnering with? According to Mr. Roberts, Children’s is venturing outside the usual medical model to the community-centric model for population health management.
Children’s partners in pediatric population health include 26 schools, faith communities, the YMCA, EMS providers, home care and more. Each partner helps build community health for children, keeping them healthier in their daily lives and in some cases — in schools — engaging in telehealth partnerships. The hospital’s three main areas of focus include asthma, obesity and place-based initiatives.
“All of our interventions are family-centered: They’re co-created and co-designed by families,” said Mr. Roberts. “We’ve invested in an health information exchange so all community stakeholders and providers are being connected, even competitors. It doesn’t matter that they compete; we all need to be connected to take care of kids to our best abilities.”
Another unique feature of the program is that it doesn’t rely on grants, foundations or donors to operate. It’s financially sustainable in its own right through careful planning, an important pillar of the program, according to Mr. Roberts.
“Five percent of kids account for 40 percent of costs,” he said. “We’ve been able to reorganize, create new processes and improve.. It’s not until you embrace a population that you put the concepts into action. When you do, you may stumble, but we’ve committed to picking ourselves back up again. And, we’ll continue to expand our uncommon partners.”
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