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Community Workers Lend Human Connection To COVID-19 Response
Publication

Community Workers Lend Human Connection To COVID-19 Response

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This article highlights how systems are investing in workers who come from the communities they serve to meet patient needs that extend well beyond clinic walls.

As people across the United States and the world grapple to survive and eventually emerge from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, a growing number of health planners and advocates propose hiring tens of thousands of additional community health workers to help.

An expanded community health workforce could respond to the enormous need for social, material and psychological support, helping people who have lost their incomes get food, strategize ways to pay their rent or mortgage, fill prescriptions, and figure out how to live more safely in crowded apartments. These needs are especially dire in low-income African American and Latino communities, which have been disproportionately afflicted by the virus.

Case Study

Aligning in Action: Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation

This case study examines how the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation's history of building one of the first Connected Communities of Care in the nation, rooted in its proprietary information exchange platform, gave it — as an intermediary or backbone organization — the necessary experience of aligning diverse stakeholders to then serve as a bridge organization for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Accountable Health Communities Model in Dallas.

Brief

Finding Innovation and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-Sector Alignment and the Response to COVID-19

This brief highlights how successfully addressing the complex challenges that affect community health — such as COVID-19 and its economic impacts — requires health care, public health, and social services to work together in new ways.

Case Study

Aligning in Action: Rocky Mountain Health Plans

This case study highlights Rocky Mountain Health Plans (RMHP), a unique example where a payer is facilitating regional efforts to address social determinants of health. RMHP serves as a bridge organization within the Accountable Health Communities Model, coordinating efforts in a largely rural area.