Tapping Community Paramedicine to Promote Value-Based Care
Health Council of East Central Florida is leveraging community paramedicine to promote value-based care efforts with their provider partners.
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By - Value-based care efforts center around reducing the costs of care while improving value. To accomplish this, one organization in Central Florida is thinking outside the box by working with community paramedicine.
The Health Council of East Central Florida is a non-profit healthcare planning organization aimed at improving healthcare delivery and outcomes. One of its biggest current initiatives is community paramedicine. In partnership with providers throughout the community, the organization identifies high-risk patients in need of follow-up care and sends paramedics to these patients’ homes for a risk assessment.
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Health Council of East Central Florida partners with hospitals, large physician practices, and accountable care organizations to help these organization’s patient populations.
“We get the referral and begin the process that is successful at reducing emergency department use, reducing hospital admissions initially and hospital readmissions,” Ken Peach, executive director of the organization shared in a recent episode of Healthcare Strategies.
High-risk patients with multiple comorbidities can frequently end up in the emergency department or readmitted to the hospital, both costly and avoidable services. In value-based care arrangements, provider organizations want to reduce the number of unnecessary hospital visits, which is where Peach and the Health Council step in.
“Unlike most community paramedicine programs, which are EMS-based, ours is not,” Peach explained. “What we do is work with individual physicians in our community to do a risk assessment.”
The Health Council’s paramedics are trained for on-site evaluation. So, when they visit a patient’s home, they evaluate the patient’s clinical state and the state of the home. The paramedics are trained to look for things like unhealthy food options in the pantry to understand if the patient is food insecure, or home layout to see if the patient is at risk of falling.
In other words, they address both the physical and social determinants of health.
“As a result of that, we find our paramedics discover a great many things that the physicians themselves will never be able to see, the things that don’t show up or are not mentioned in a clinical visit,” Peach concluded.
