The federal government has announced a $157 million project to help hospitals and doctors link Medicare and Medicaid patients to needed social services that sometimes have a bigger impact on their health than medical interventions.
Public health experts have known for decades that even with medical care easily available, patients are often limited in their ability to get better or maintain good health if they lack stable housing, access to healthy food, or the ability to get to and from medical appointments.
The goal of the “Accountable Health Communities” project is to find better ways to identify patients’ non-medical needs and connect them to available services in their communities. The social services to be linked include those related to housing, food, personal safety, inability to pay utility bills and transportation. The project will fund up to 44 separate experiments over five years. Applications are being accepted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and announcement of the winning proposals is expected later this year.
[For more of this story, written by Julie Rovner, go to http://khn.org/news/feds-fundi...ces-to-social-needs/]
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