May 17th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
To address current challenges in delivering quality heath care in the United States, we can deploy concrete, existing innovations from domestic and international health in resource-constrained environments.
Health Leads CEO and co-founder Rebecca Onie is the co-author of an article in the Summer 2012 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “Realigning Health with Care: Lessons in Delivering More with Less” shines a light on the need for America to expand the scope of health care, the place where it is delivered and the workforce that provides it as a means to improve health outcomes and reduce inefficiencies. Partners in Health’s Paul Farmer and The PACT Project’s Heidi Behforouz collaborated with Onie as co-authors.
Health Leads is one of several organizations (domestic and abroad) cited in the article that “widens the frame of health care,” highlighting the availability and practicality of viable solutions already in place to salvage a health care system in crisis. Health Leads redefines health care by “broadening the health care product to include connections to basic resources like food and housing; broadening the health care place by using hospital waiting rooms to make resource connections; and broadening the health care provider, by integrating
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April 2nd, 2012 by Colleen Downie
Can we rewrite the DNA of the healthcare system?
This is the question Health Leads Co-Founder and CEO Rebecca Onie will pose to TEDMED delegates in Washington, D.C. next week Tuesday, April 10.
The healthcare system is in crisis, with no straightforward solutions for our most complex health problems. What if everything we needed was in front of us the whole time? Rebecca Onie will speak to how we can rewrite the DNA of today’s healthcare system to address patients’ basic resource needs as a standard part of care delivery.
We invite you to:
Watch
Find a TEDMEDLive Simulcast viewing party near you.
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View online or via TED mobile app when the video is posted in a few weeks.
Share
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When
Tuesday, April 10
5:00pm – 7:00pm
For more information on TEDMED, click here.
March 29th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
Next week, join Health Leads Co-Founder and CEO Rebecca Onie and other health care leaders for the “Health Care’s Blind Side” Webinar – Integrating Patients’ Social Needs Into Health Care Delivery hosted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). During the webinar, Rebecca will discuss the Health Leads model and the importance of addressing patients’ basic resource needs as a standard part of care.
In December 2011, RWJF released survey findings indicating that 85 percent of primary care doctors surveyed feel it is as important to address patients’ resource needs as it is to treat their medical conditions. Overwhelmingly, they wish they had greater capacity to eliminate social barriers to their patients’ health—things like access to nutritious foods, housing assistance, and reliable transportation—and want the ability to write prescriptions to connect patients with such resources.
This survey validated the frustrations we regularly hear from doctors about their ability to address the resource needs of their patients within our current health care system. Health Leads envisions a new model for health care delivery in which patients’ basic needs – such as food, housing and heating assistance – are addressed as a standard part of care.
To continue
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March 15th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
For Cynthia Osman, M.D., Health Leads’ model is integral to her standard of patient care…and always has been. During her residency program at Boston Medical Center (then Boston City Hospital), she first encountered Health Leads through co-founder Barry Zuckerman, M.D., and other leaders of her program. She says, “They were all very invested in this model of connecting families who had needs with services in the community that can meet those needs”.
Dr. Osman now practices at Bellevue Pediatric Clinic in New York City where she continues to refer her patients to Health Leads. “I never had a time when I didn’t have [Health Leads] which I feel very grateful for…I really think it does improve things for families.” To hear more from Dr. Osman, watch the video below.
March 15th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
When I first joined Health Leads in the fall of my sophomore year, I was driven primarily by two desires: to make a difference in the lives of families in Providence and to better understand how social and economic situations affect health. I knew conceptually that these factors affected health, but I had only a vague, academic understanding of what that really meant. As an aspiring physician, I thought working with Health Leads would complement my future medical education while allowing me to start improving the health of families before I donned my white coat and stethoscope.
Working with Health Leads in the Hasbro Children’s Hospital outpatient clinic, I saw first-hand the countless social and economic barriers families face in achieving good health. My shift partner and I sat with a man from Lower South Providence and helped him navigate the application process for utilities subsidies; the next week we worked with a woman to request a first floor apartment from the Providence Public Housing Authority. Having met these families and seen how their living situations impacted their health, I felt better able to articulate why these social needs should be addressed in the healthcare system in
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March 15th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
Since 2001, Health Leads has partnered with The Diana L. and Stephen A. Goldberg Center for Community Pediatric Health at Children’s National Medical Center. The clinic provides invaluable support for our program, including the expertise and guidance of its physicians, nurses, social workers, and other providers. They recognize the critical importance of social needs in their patients’ lives and know they are healthier when these needs are met.
Health Leads is featured in the Goldberg Center’s 2010-2011 Annual Report “Shaping the Future of Community Health” in a section on innovative partnerships. LaToya White, Health Leads Program Director for the Mid-Atlantic Region, says “Dr. Denice Cora-Bramble [Senior Vice President of the Goldberg Center] and her staff have welcomed Health Leads to a team of people committed to making families healthier. Our work together continues to connect D.C.-area families with the resources they need to be healthy.”
March 15th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
On Sunday, March 4, CityLine – a news magazine program of Boston’s ABC affiliate WCVB-TV 5 – interviewed Ingrid Trench, a Health Leads client from The Dimock Center, and Mark Marino, Executive Director of Health Leads Boston, who explained how Health Leads works, the role of our college volunteers, and the ways in which we integrate with our clinical partners. Ingrid shared her story of how, on the recommendation of her daughter’s pediatrician, “Health Leads became an advocate for [her]” – connecting her to food and education resources. To watch the full interview on CityLine’s website, click here.
March 13th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
With Health Leads, healthcare providers are able to treat the underlying conditions that influence an individual’s health, such as access to food and shelter. Known as “social determinants of health,” they are defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, including the health system.”
Kohar Jones, M.D., a physician at the Chicago Family Health Center, describes how Health Leads volunteers enable providers in her clinic to address the social needs of patients and their families. “They are my social needs specialists,” she says. She explains that Health Leads has “transformed” the way she deals with the social determinants of health, allowing her to focus on biological issues while volunteers respond to non-medical needs that affect patients’ health. She also describes how social workers in her clinic are able to concentrate on critical health issues in which they have specialized training, including domestic violence and substance abuse.
Health Leads offers a model for integrated and comprehensive care in which healthcare providers can prescribe solutions that improve health, not just manage disease. Watch the video below to hear Dr. Jones discuss Health Leads at the Chicago Family
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February 28th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
In January, Health Leads welcomed six current volunteers from across our sites to our National Office for a winternship (winter internship). They worked closely with Asha Strazzero-Wild, Director of Volunteers, to design a system for gathering and maintaining alumni information to help enroll future alumni into the Health Leads Alumni Database and helped create the foundation for the first annual alumni survey- COMING SOON! Hear from one of these volunteers below.
Boston is a city known for its excellent hospitals, sports teams, and institutions of higher education. It is also the home of the Health Leads national office. As a volunteer for Health Leads in the Johns Hopkins Bayview Emergency Department for two semesters, I heard about the opportunity to work with the national team through my program manager. The “winternship,” as it was called, seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn more about the organization, its leaders, their strategy, and reconnect with why I started to volunteer with them in the first place.
Over the course of a week this past January, I did just that. My week started out, bright and early, on Monday morning. I traveled along with the five other winterns (winter
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February 8th, 2012 by Colleen Downie
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded Health Leads a two-year $4.5M grant to demonstrate the economic value of our model and expand our program to new locations, increasing our capacity to serve low-income patients.
“We are pleased to provide this renewed funding for Health Leads, whose innovative model helps to eliminate the social barriers that stand in the way of people improving their health,” says Wendy Yallowitz, program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Vulnerable Populations portfolio. “We look forward to working with Health Leads as it continues to build the infrastructure needed to scale its model and help change the way health care is delivered so that patients’ unmet resource needs are addressed as a standard part of medical care.”
The largest grant in our 16-year history, the funds will support the growth and evaluation of our program to build a case that compels the US health care system to invest financially in connecting patients with the basic resources they need to be healthy. This grant also allows Health Leads to make the key capacity investments in technology and talent necessary to support this work.
“Health Leads envisions a health
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