Health center patients come from a wide range of cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds, and health centers have been successful at delivering culturally competent care to all of their patients and successfully bringing community members in for care. During a time of polarizing political issues, health care reform, immigration reform debate, and other policy challenges and opportunities for health centers, it is more important than ever that health center patients express their voice to its full force. This session will discuss methods for integrating advocacy into health center operations and the best practices for doing so in culturally competent ways. Participants will hear from experts working with the farmworker and homeless populations, and other diverse groups to learn methods for culturally competent outreach and education, strategies for engaging in more advocacy and civic engagement with these populations, and the importance and power of doing so for the future of health centers and the millions of patients they serve.

Community health workers (CHWs) have made important contributions to communities and health and social service systems for decades. Although interest in the CHW workforce has grown in recent years, further progress is impeded by fragmented policy development efforts, persistent lack of stakeholder understanding of CHWs, and lack of a unified voice for the workforce itself. This session will describe two prominent new and interrelated national projects addressing these barriers, and provide an update on important initiatives by federal agencies and national organizations regarding CHWs.

While the UDS Mapper continues to be an essential tool for making service area maps, it has uses in other functional areas. The UDS Mapper team will present valuable data layers and novel ways the tool can assist health centers’ strategic planning by leveraging population health and clinical program development, identifying outreach and enrollment opportunities, and providing targeted employment strategies. Additionally, the team will discuss various methodologies on how to use the UDS Mapper to develop research analyses on opioids, veterans, disaster response, and related topics of interest.    

NACHC, with the assistance of John Snow, Inc., first developed a tool (formerly NACHC's Payment Reform Readiness Assessment Tool) to assist health centers in the pursuit of cost-effective care and to assess their current state of readiness while identifying areas for improvement. This session will discuss updates to the tool and will demonstrate how the tool can be used to put your health center on the path of achieving the Quadruple Aim. Finally, the discussion will demonstrate how the data provided by health centers will help drive payment reform and delivery system transformation efforts in their own states.  

This session will introduce attendees to the broad spectrum of programming and resources available through NACHC's Advocacy department and highlight three key programs to demonstrate how conference participants can become involved and engaged with the Health Center Advocacy Network.