Community health workers—trusted laypeople from local communities who help high-risk patients to address social issues like food and housing insecurity—can help reduce hospital stays by 65 percent and double the rate of patient satisfaction with primary care, according to new study results published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study, conducted by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on chronically-ill low-income patients and U.S. veterans, and is the first multi-center randomized controlled trial to demonstrate these kinds of improvements resulting from a health system-based social intervention.
"Improving health quality while lowering costly hospitalizations is what so many health care leaders are trying to achieve," says lead study author Shreya Kangovi, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Medicine and founding executive director of the Penn Center for Community Health Workers. "It's remarkable that these results were achieved not by an expensive drug or technology, but from good old-fashioned social support."
Shifts in financing have pushed health care organizations toward addressing social issues—eviction notices or domestic violence—that make it difficult for millions of working class Americans to stay healthy. Community health workers are well-positioned to address these issues because they've experienced similar challenges themselves. While they are a rapidly growing health care workforce, many programs struggle due to insufficient standardization, a lack of rigorous scientific evidence or because they only apply to one disease.
[For more on this study by Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, go to https://medicalxpress.com/news...percent-patient.html]
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