GRANT WILL FUND PROGRAM TO ADDRESS NEEDS OF FREQUENT PATIENTS

Humboldt County has received a grant that will address the needs of frequent hospital patients. Members of the community met to discuss ideas for the project that the grant will fund."The event is an opportunity to bring leadership together to discuss the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant," said Sharon Hunter, Care Transitions program manager.The $200,000 grant will go towards a two-year project, with the intention to provide better healthcare and lower costs to address patients that are ‘super-utilizers.’"These are the patients that the healthcare system has really given up on, and they get really bad care," said Jeffery Brenner.Brenner is the Executive Director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers in New Jersey. He calls them ‘super-utilizers’ because their needs aren't met, so they visit the hospital frequently. “Up in the city of Trenton where we have a sister organization, we found a patient that had been 450 times in the last year,” Brenner said.Brenner shared information about his program, so the ideas might be helpful in Humboldt."Rural communities and urban communities have an ethic to do more with less,” Brenner said. “That's a good start to figuring out how to deliver better care at lower costs."Which is why Humboldt was one of the six communities picked for a grant. "It’s a great area for us to encapsulate an idea, try it out, learn from it, and then other communities are able to learn from it as well," Hunter said.Brenner says this is especially important in a time where Medicare and Medicaid are on the verge of a fiscal"We maybe able to separate Siamese twins and perform heart transplants, but we don’t know how to fix the healthcare system," Brenner said.