Sustainable and effective health center operations are achieved when there is alignment between people, process and place. Due to the ever-changing healthcare environment including a shift to team-based and integrated care, we cannot make decisions in isolation. This session will introduce the concept of decision-making and change through the lens of continuously aligning people, process and place.

This session will introduce the concepts and establish a framework to think differently about operations through these three unified lenses. We will look at the people you have working at your health center, the spaces in which they work and see patients, and the processes that they follow (both EMR driven as well as both written and unwritten habits and protocols). This session explores the possibilities and first steps in looking through the lens of continuously aligning people, processes and place.

This session will focus on the use of data and tools to assess, optimize and sustain operational efficiency within your organization. Day to day operations are undoubtedly impacted by all financial, clinical and human resource decisions that are made within your health center. In order for you, as an operational leader within your organization, to proactively sustain operational efficiencies that are aligned with interdepartmental decisions, it is essential that you have your hands on the right qualitative and quantitative data!

In the past three years, physician burnout has increased by almost nine percent for many reasons. Physicians, as well as non-clinical teams, are currently faced with challenges such as the introduction of new technologies to the workflow, limitations on patient involvement in their care, and an overall absence of work-life balance. In this session, participants will identify the leading causes of burnout and learn proven strategies to reduce it amongst your team. You will develop an action plan to foster well-being and joy in the workplace.

In order to operate effectively, the process of gathering, understanding and evaluating measurement data is vital for health centers. This session will focus on the various types of measurement for health centers; a practical discussion on how and what data to measure and report data for successful decision making. We will evaluate how to prepare and engage health center staff for using internal data and meeting external data reporting requirements.

This session will focus on an overview of the budgeting process including types of budgets, different approaches to budgeting and the role of the service line, department leads and other operational managers in the development of budgets. Also, this session will discuss the impact of daily operations on the profitability and cash flow of a health center and budgeting process and the impact of daily operations on profitability and cash flow. The session will discuss the importance of accountability and staff awareness of their role in fiscal sustainability.

During this session, attendees will learn about HRSA’s greatly-expanded and streamlined Loan Guarantee Program. The program is intended to assist health centers in accessing capital to expand and modernize their physical facilities—and in so doing, provide greater access to care for patients and augment service offerings, including primary medical care, integrated dental and behavioral health, substance use services, vision, pharmacy and enabling services. At this session, you will learn how to prepare for and apply to the program, as well as how to access available technical assistance resources to assist with the planning and application process.

Identifying the social determinant of health drivers of poor outcomes and higher costs is increasingly important in today’s value based environment. By collecting standardized data on the social determinants of health, health centers and other providers can better understand the complexity of their patient populations and provide them with needed services, whether in-house or through community partnerships. The Protocol for Responding to and Assessing Patients’ Assets, Risks and Experiences (PRAPARE) is a standardized social determinant of health risk assessment tool developed by NACHC, in partnership with AAPCHO and OPCA, to help health centers inform care transformation and demonstrate the value they bring to patients, communities, and payers.
This session will pr
ovide an introduction to PRAPARE, replicable implementation strategies based on best practices from early adopting health centers, and examples of how it has led to impactful change at the patient-, provider-, organizational-, community-, and state policy levels. This session will incorporate both didactic as well as interactive and peer learning to build organizational readiness for social determinant of health data collection.