Foundation Testifies On Health Care Disparities

Miriam Messinger, Associate Director of Grantmaking and Evaluation for the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, shared lessons learned from the Foundation’s Closing the Gap on Health Care Disparities program area.

A program focused on reducing the rates of cardiovascular disease in Latino patients at the Holyoke Health Center saw some successes by implementing the following changes:

• Conducting nutrition and exercise classes in Spanish;
• Hiring bicultural and bilingual staff;
• Incorporating smoking cessation efforts into every visit at the Center.

An Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention program focused on improving the mental health of Dorchester-based students impacted by violence-related trauma measured the following improvements:

• School-based services lead to greatly enhanced communication between providers and teachers and providers and family;
• On-site services greatly reduced the numbers of missed appointments;
• Fee-for-service paid for all but $4,000 of a mental health provider’s full-time salary.

Messinger also shared promising strategies in eliminating health care disparities from lessons learned by the Foundation’s nine grantees of the three-year Closing the Gap on Health Care Disparities program area:

• Community voice in defining problems and creating solutions.
• Coalition building to bring together key stakeholders from community agencies, government, and local businesses.
• Focus on system and provider changes more than individual behavior modifications.
• Adopt a learning approach in the working across silos and including frequent feedback and evaluation.
• Community education about disparities and root causes is critical to building public support for the resources necessary to implement successful change.
• Utilize a social determinants approach—if we do not begin to look upstream and ensure that all our residents live in healthy and vibrant communities then our best programs will always be full.

The testimony can be read in full at BlueCrossFoundation.org.

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