NYC Well being + Hospitals, the biggest municipal healthcare system within the nation, says it’s making regular progress in screening sufferers for social wants and integrating instruments into its EHR to make that screening simpler for clinicians.
The well being system has built-in a device from a vendor referred to as findhelp into Epic to attach sufferers to neighborhood sources. The device features a social service referral platform and community of greater than 7,000 applications – together with meals help, transportation, and shelter – serving New York Metropolis that’s recurrently up to date to make sure accuracy.
NYC Well being + Hospitals’ social wants screening program screened greater than 250,000 main care sufferers for social wants in outpatient settings in 2023. Over one in 4 sufferers who had been screened final yr wished help with social wants. The brand new platform will assist well being system employees refer sufferers to neighborhood sources. Later this yr, NYC Well being + Hospitals, which has 11 hospitals and greater than 70 affected person care areas throughout the town’s 5 boroughs, will broaden its social wants screening to incorporate inpatient settings.
“As docs, we all know that too usually our sufferers are combating making ends meet, and that could be a significantly irritating barrier to getting or staying wholesome,” stated Nichola Davis, M.D., M.S., vp and chief inhabitants well being officer at NYC Well being + Hospitals, in an announcement. “This new referral platform and patient-facing web site for workers is a robust new device in our toolbox to assist our sufferers join with neighborhood providers and sources.”
Findhelp permits NYC Well being + Hospitals employees to generate automated useful resource suggestions after finishing the Social Determinants of Well being screening device in Epic. The suggestions are tailor-made to the place sufferers reside and is then added to the paperwork that sufferers obtain after a physician’s go to. Workers will even use the findhelp platform to seek for community-based sources to deal with affected person wants and may share them with sufferers by way of textual content or electronic mail of their most popular language. They will even ship closed-loop referrals to pick community-based organizations to follow-up with sufferers and join them to care.
Sufferers can even entry findhelp via a brand new web site to search out native community-based organizations that supply social providers, similar to meals help, transportation, shelter, and ESL and job coaching applications. Sufferers can entry the location via Epic’s MyChart or immediately from the NYC Well being +. Hospitals homepage by clicking “Discover Assets in My Neighborhood.”
