Operations Specialists Rustam Ushurov and Julie Carasone are reaching out to healthcare providers in the area and educating them on how to be more culturally competent to the population that they are serving here in WNY.
Ushurov who is with WNY R-AHEC and Carasone, working with Lake Plains Community Care Network, have been tasked with bringing the health care providers together and discussing what has been working and what they can do better in their urban or rural settings.
This past Wednesday a learning collaborative was held for the Finger Lakes Performing Provider System(FLPPS). The project has been ongoing since 2015 and will end in 2020.
“What we are trying to do is reduce unnecessary emergency department visits, and the way we are trying to do this is by understanding the culture and health literacy of our most vulnerable populations,” says Julie Carasone, Operations Specialist, Cultural Competence and Health Literacy Lake Plains Community Care Network.
At Wednesdays learning collaborative many healthcare providers shared ideas, learned other things people are doing and learned of different services, websites/apps to use that may be able to assist people with language barriers, people who use sign language or those who are non verbal or low verbal.
“We’re trying to teach our staff more cultural competence to make our patients more comfortable,” says Lisa Deahn, Office Manager at Pembroke Family Care.
“With the health literacy part of it we are trying to make sure that patients understand what they are being told in their appointments and why they are having a test. I have learned of more ideas and other things that people are doing, the information goes both ways, they might not know about something I’m doing that helps everybody in return.”
In 2014, when the project started, the goal was to reduce avoidable admissions and hospitalizations by 25% over the course of 5 years.
These projects are part of the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program. DSRIP incentivizes healthcare and community-based providers to form regional collaborations and implement innovative system transformation to better serve Medicaid and uninsured populations who often experience greater healthcare disparities.
Up to $6.42 billion dollars are allocated to the NYS DSRIP program with payouts based upon achieving predefined results in system transformation, clinical management, and population health.
“All the facilities thought they could do it by themselves and the state said no you need to gather into groups and then create an organization that will help,” says Rustam Ushurov, Operations Specialist Cultural Competence and Health Literacy Program Coordinator.
Ushurov says since 2015 they have been looking to see if there are any positive experiences that they’ve seen from their patients and good health outcomes.
“Not only are we talking about race and ethnicity, but we are also talking about different populations, urban or rural, younger, older, how to work with them. how to talk to them, how to schedule their physical appointment. If they don’t speak the English language or are visiting tourists, migrant populations, we need to be able to communicate their needs and understand how to explain to them certain things so that they can get better and we can get better health outcomes.”
“The purpose of the learning collaborative was to identify the successes of the Cultural Competence and Health Literacy Initiative and what are the barriers and how to overcome them. Our agencies are doing great work in noticing the barriers to receiving health care in our rural area, and making those barriers less, so that our consumers can reduce emergency department visits, and also reduce chronic illnesses,” says Carasone.
The providers at Wednesday’s meeting were from Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming Counties.
“We do feel like we are helping them definitely because we do see there are changes being implemented, we do see that signage is different and how providers are talking differently as well. It might not always be so visible, its going to take a while before we reach 100%, but we are getting there” says Ushurov.
