Striving for Whole-Person Wellness
Southwest Washington Accountable Community of Health (SWACH) is proud to be the home of the HealthConnect Hub - an innovative platform that connects regional agencies and partners to provide a holistic, coordinated approach to providing services to community members. Through the hub, we regularly help individuals with intersecting health and social services needs.
This is what makes the HealthConnect Hub so unique. In normal settings, many of these needs would go unmet (and often unnoticed) due to the siloed nature of different services. With HealthConnect, we can break down those barriers and create a wrap-around network that addresses each of these challenges a community member may be facing. The end goal of the HealthConnect Hub is to help community members achieve “whole-person wellness”, which includes understanding and supporting the overlap of various needs.
As part of October’s HealthConnect Bulletin, we are exploring some of those intersections and what it means for care coordination.
From February 2019 to July 2020, HealthConnect enrolled 400 community members through referral agencies. These referrals covered a wide selection of physical and behavioral health conditions. Common among these conditions were chronic pain, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and PTSD.
Figure 1 includes the percentage of HealthConnect participants with various physical and behavioral health conditions.
Knowing that these conditions can overlap and further complicate one another, the same survey looked at individuals who had multiple conditions that required support.
Figure 2 highlights that most individuals participating in HealthConnect Pathways had multiple health conditions. It additionally showed that for the majority of participants, those conditions were co-occurring, meaning they required support for each condition at the same time.
This data shows the chronic health conditions and needs among the individuals served by HealthConnect Pathways. The data shows the tremendous need for behavioral health and physical health services in our community and emphasizes the opportunities that CBWs have to support individuals’ health needs. They can open up pathways to meet all these needs and connect the client to the appropriate services.
For example, this report illustrates almost 400 participants enrolled in the pathways program, and nearly 60% reported having behavioral health and medical issues. This means that CBWs had an opportunity to open up a pathway for finding a medical provider (or primary care provider) for the client to address both needs.
The intersection of multiple health conditions, many of which are co-occurring, highlights the critical work being done by the local community-based workforce. CBWs play an important role in connecting the dots for individuals, ensuring that their additional needs are met.
The HealthConnect Hub gives us a platform to connect individuals to the wrap-around care they need. Working together, we can better ensure that community members can address the “whole picture” of their health. As we continue to support CBWs through our partners, we will be able to provide even more pathways to support whole-person wellness.
