Hospitals ‘navigate’ religious communities
Memphis health system leads cost-cutting trend
MEMPHIS, TN -- Two mainstays of the Memphis community – the Methodist Le Bonheur hospital system and nearly 400 local churches – have teamed up for a program that helps keep church members healthy while reducing healthcare costs.
Methodist says 70 percent of its patients belong to churches. To help people get the care they need when they need it, the system assigns hospital staff, called "navigators,'' to work with volunteer liaisons at area churches that have joined the health system's Congregational Health Network.
When a member of one of these congregations is admitted to the hospital, the navigator notifies the liaison. The liaison then plans a visit, if the member wishes, “so they have a support structure, not just the nurse and doctor,” said Valerie Murphy, the liaison for a small church of six families in Millington, a rural area north of Memphis.
When it comes time to discharge the patient, the liaison works with the navigator to make sure that the transition happens smoothly, connecting the patient with community services such as meals-on-wheels and transportation.
“It's the social connections, the nitty-gritty practical stuff that makes a huge difference,” said Gary Gunderson, senior vice president for health and welfare ministries at Methodist. “Whether people understand how to take their medications, whether there's food in the house.”
The health system compared the experiences and costs of 473 patients in the program with those of similar non-participating patients who received standard care from 2007 to 2009: The mortality rate for those in the network was 50 percent lower than for non-participating patients; their hospital readmission rates were 20 percent lower.
In the future, Methodist expects to reap savings by reducing the need for high-end specialized care and avoiding penalties for hospital readmission, said Teresa Cutts, Methodist's director of research for innovation at its Center of Excellence in Faith and Health.
Patient education is another key to the program's long-term success. In addition to helping hospital patients, the liaisons work to educate members of their congregations about healthful living and disease prevention.
Methodist may have one of the most extensive programs, but it's by no means the only health system partnering with churches to improve congregation members' health. At Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California, medical staff from the Seventh-day Adventist health system provide free health screening and education to members of area churches, said Dora Barilla, the medical center's director of community health development.
Recently, for example, a neurologist with the Loma Linda physicians group spoke at a Temecula church with a large Hispanic population about the signs of stroke and early dementia, and about available services. "Our research showed that Spanish-speaking populations weren't necessarily accessing dementia services," said Barilla.
Although many health systems that are working with churches to develop their "health ministries" are faith-based, not all are. For more than a decade, the Inova Health System in Northern Virginia has been working with religious communities on health promotion and prevention through its Congregational Health Partnership. To better serve the area's wide variety of faiths and languages, Inova employs different program managers to work with Hispanic, Muslim, Korean, Vietnamese and African American groups.
If this volunteer work sounds like a very good deal for financially strapped healthcare systems, it is. "We're saving a lot of money," said Gunderson. "We're mobilizing and aligning hundreds of people that we couldn't pay," he says, referring to the roughly 500 volunteer church liaisons.
This article was reprinted from Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service and a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan healthcare policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
