Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW) alongside its parent association Community Health Network of Washington (CHNW), reported in late September that they will join the Washington State Health Care Authority (HCA) in propelling the objectives of health equity.
The CHPW/CHNW/HCA union is one of seven national teams included intensely chosen state Medicaid offices, Medicaid health plans, and healthcare conveyance systems that will cooperate to diminish health inconsistencies as a feature of the Advancing Health Equity Learning Collaborative.
The Learning Collaborative is a segment of the Advancing Health Equity: Leading Care, Payment, and Systems Transformation program (AHE), based at the University of Chicago and led in partnership with the Institute for Medicaid Innovation and the Center for Health Care Strategies.
“Health equity is often a goal put forward by healthcare organizations, but can be challenging to maintain at the center of the work. This project will keep health equity as the primary focus of its work. This is the first time that work of this nature and at this scale, centered on health equity, has been carried out,” says Leanne Berge, CEO of CHPW and CHNW. “Given the collaborative nature of this project, teams of Medicaid agencies, health plans, and providers from across the country will have the opportunity to design models that address disparities and learn from each other along the way. The opportunity to have the State Medicaid Agency as part of the team allows for possible policy changes that may be needed to tackle the barriers to addressing health disparities.”
The Collaborative will meet throughout the following two years to design integrated payment and healthcare conveyance changes to accomplish health value and after that actualize these endeavors as a major aspect of Medicaid payer-supplier partnerships in seven states. The teams will likewise join intercessions to address social determinants of health (SDoH) with the point of delivering best practice and arrangement suggestions.
“Without addressing health equity overall, we won’t be able to achieve the goals of improving individual and community health. The collaborative learning approach will help the AHE program participants understand how we can best meet the needs of our most vulnerable populations and learn from the experiences of the other teams and national experts,” Berge says. “As the seven teams participating in the program work to develop models to reduce specific health disparities, we’ll learn a lot about how to advance health equity through improved healthcare policies at the organizational, state and national levels.”