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A WIN Win?
Grant awarded to YNHH to create model for care of under-insured
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Business New Haven
1/21/2002
By: Susan Cornell
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH) a grant in the amount of $992,000 to develop a national model to address the growing enigma of under-insured and uninsured patients locally and nationally.
The initiative, to be known as the “Wellness Information Network” (WIN), will be a collaborative effort among Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH), the Fair Haven Community Health Center, Hill Health Center, the Hospital of Saint Raphael, and the New Haven Health Department. Under YNHH's direction, the five organizations will develop a new integrated health system intended to improve access to health care and reduce cost barriers for the un- and under-insured.
The grant will help to create a database to allow health-care providers to share relevant information to facilitate access for the under- and uninsured. Further, WIN funding will support a citywide case-management system - a Community Health Information Network - to address, meet and monitor the needs of those with inadequate or no insurance. Staff at collaborating institutions will help patients to choose a medical provider, which will then become their “medical home.” Additionally, staff at each institution will work to help patients secure health coverage and to ensure easier access to the health-care system.
The WIN project will address a problem confronting health-care institutions nationwide: communications between neighboring institutions within the same market that share a population of under- and uninsured patients. WIN's goals are to share information and to work collaboratively toward better serving patients in their “medical home,” eliminating repeated expensive trips to emergency departments and multiple and preventable patient visits.
It is hoped that hospitals and communities across the country will benefit from the WIN model because it will help reduce the costs of treating un- and under-insured patients while freeing up emergency department staff so that they are better able to care for critically ill patients.
“We're extremely proud that [HHS] has selected Yale-New Haven Hospital to be the leading health-care institution for this important initiative,” says the executive director of the department of community health at Yale-New Haven Hospital, James E. Rawlings. “Presently, many underinsured and uninsured individuals utilize the emergency department as their only source of health care. Often, they arrive at the hospital's doors in advanced stages of illness. Care is expensive and often duplicated at the emergency rooms in New Haven and around the country. The WIN Network will seek to find earlier solutions for these complex problems and ensure high quality health care for those in need within our community.
“We hope to have the infrastructure for the information system up in two months for all sites,” Rawlings adds. “We're pretty far along now and have been working since September.”
In New Haven, the grant may benefit patients, the city medical institutions and the community by coordinating and providing better medical care, and by reducing the enormous costs associated with medical care provided on an emergency or episodic basis.
Rawlings believes that New Haven will start reaping the benefits over the next three to four months. “It will be individually - patient by patient - with social work intervention to meet their needs.”
Adds Rawlings: “This is the first time it's been done in real-time. Everyone gains in terms of efficiency and quality.” Nationally, “We'll demonstrate that [how the quality of life has changed] in six months into 2003 because we'll have a great database. The patients themselves will speak to how it has changed their lives.
“If you marshal the money in a certain way, costs go down, and it makes a more efficient system and then everyone gains,” Rawlings explains. “Leveraging the resources and intellect of Yale, and partnering with the federal government, we think we can produce something significant.”
Yale-New Haven Hospital is a 944-bed non-profit hospital serving as the primary teaching hospital for the Yale University School of Medicine. YNHH is the largest acute care provider in southern Connecticut as well as one of the Northeast's major referral centers. The hospital was founded as the fifth voluntary hospital in the United States in 1826. Today the complex includes the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital and the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. A combined medical staff of some 2,400 university and community physicians practice in more than 100 specialties.
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