Opening General Session
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Health Care for the Justice Involved and Formerly Incarcerated
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Incarceration has a lasting impact on the individual returning home and the community they return home to. A growing number of health centers are developing responses to the health and social disparities that returning persons with chronic disease, mental health disorder, and/or substance use disorder experience when they are not properly linked with a medical home and welcoming community. These programs seek to bring public safety and public health together to enroll formerly incarcerated individuals in primary care and behavioral health options while reducing emergency room utilization, hospitalizations, and recidivism. This panel discussion will highlight work done at the local, state, and federal levels to meet the needs of this vulnerable group and examine the medical, operational, and policy implications for health centers working with this population.
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Fostering a Culture of Business Intelligence and Good Data
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Health centers need data to show they are caring for safety-net populations who comprise a significant percentage of the highest risk, highest cost patients in our health system at a lower cost, while achieving better outcomes and increasing patient satisfaction.This session will focus on Business Intelligence (BI) and its importance for safety-net providers. Presenters will also identify strategies for overcoming the major challenges and barriers to building BI competency, as well as lessons learned and key components for building your own BI capacity.
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Clear on Cost: Conversations Between Health Center Patients and Providers About Cost of Care - NCA FEATURED
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Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN), funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, conducted a one-year study of adult patients receiving health center care to determine best practices for conducting cost-of-care (CoC) conversations and optimal methods for training clinic staff. This project examined determinants of building trust between clinicians and their patient populations to improve acceptance and implementation of CoC conversations. Session presenters will showcase staff training modules, with background and evidence about the potential improvement on patient adherence and outcomes with positive CoC conversations; tools for health insurance literacy for patient handouts; and a clinic CoC conversation policy template.
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The Health Center Program Compliance Manual from a Financial Perspective
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This session will address the financially focused areas of the Health Center Program Compliance Manual. Presenters will discuss policy considerations and language that HRSA believes will ensure that grant recipients have policies in place that are compliant with the Uniform Grants Guidance and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Grants Policy Statement. Special consideration will be made for findings most commonly disclosed in single audit reports, HHS Office of Inspector General reports, HRSA Operational Site Visit reports, and DFI grant reviews which are designed to ensure Health Centers have safeguards in place for the appropriate financial stewardship of federal funds.
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Strategic Planning - Part 1: Operationalizing the Strategic Plan in the Face of Change and Uncertainty
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While always important, strategic planning has recently become an organizational imperative for health centers as they seek to successfully navigate uncharted territory. The health care industry is experiencing rapid change brought on by demographic shifts, economic influences, policy changes, and bureaucratic adjustments. These changes are especially significant for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) because of their significant reliance on government programs for reimbursement. This session - led by a health center CEO - will provide a concrete, how-to guide for organizations beginning or refining their strategic planning process. Part 2: An Introduction to a Dynamic Toolkit for Health Centers (PThG2) will serve as a continuation of this topic and provide an overview of a strategic planning toolkit.
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Health Centers Serving Veterans: What Do You Need to Know?
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Many health centers are involved in providing essential health services to veterans who live in their communities. As a result of these efforts, health centers have reported that they served in excess of 320,000 veterans in 2016 alone. There are several ways for a health center to be a recognized community provider of services to veterans. This session will review the provider participation options available to health centers, describe how to approach and complete the provider application process, and discuss how payment for services occurs.
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Health Center Workforce Programs Fell Over the Cliff, Lessons Learned
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The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) and the Teaching Health Centers Graduate Medical Education (THCGME) program help health centers to attract and retain the most talented workforce possible to meet the needs of vulnerable patients and populations. These health workforce programs also provide significant resources such as scholarships, loan repayments, and clinician residency training to ensure that a skilled workforce will be available for health center patients in the future. About half of the NHSC clinicians serve in health centers and nearly half of the 5,000 NHSC-approved sites are community health centers. Mandatory funding for both these programs ended on September 30, 2017 removing $370,000,000 annually in workforce investments in health centers. What has been the impact of these programs going over the cliff? This session will highlight how health centers and their partners have worked to mitigate these impacts and the lessons learned in the process.
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Promising Practices for Helping Families Dealing with Trauma
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Traumatic situations, such as abuse, neglect, experiencing natural disasters, seeing family members impacted by immigration situations, or witnessing violent acts, can affect a child’s development. Health centers can lessen the impact of childhood trauma via the provision of workshops for parents and training for teachers to recognize signs and symptoms, short or long-term counseling, and therapy sessions at various levels. Nationally, we are also seeing long-term champions for children, such as Sesame Workshop and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, increase their attention to develop resources in this space. Presenters will discuss their experiences and programs that have proven effective at the health center level, identify resources for providers and families, and engage participants in a robust Q&A on how health centers can lead.
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Understanding Your Cost of Care as a Health Center - NCA FEATURED
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This session will introduce two new resources related to calculating and benchmarking your health center’s cost of care. The first resource focuses on presenting a methodology for calculating cost of care, including appropriately allocating direct and indirect costs to various services. The second resource presents health center cost of care trends based on UDS data for use as a benchmarking tool, providing comparative data for health centers of various sizes, in urban/rural locations, and based on comprehensiveness of care. Capital Link staff and a health center CFO will discuss the importance of using this information and data in a fee-for-service environment and as the sector transitions to a value-based reimbursement.
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