Mary White makes house calls. She’s a senior community health worker in Philadelphia in the IMPaCT program at the Penn Center for Community Health Workers. She has 25 of the University of Pennsylvania Health System’s toughest patients. It’s her job to help them set health goals and, step by step, carry them out.
One of her patients is Grover Wilson, an engaging man of 56 who weighs 515 pounds. Wilson had long been athletic and sociable, the organizer of a long-running community volleyball game. But depression and an injury led him to gain weight. Now he lives in a tiny basement apartment packed floor to ceiling with boxes of his possessions, and is trapped and isolated by his weight.
In 2010, researchers from Penn began interviewing patients who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods about what they saw as barriers that kept them from getting health care, and kept them sick. Those responses — from long interviews with 115 patients — became the basis of the Penn Center and IMPaCT, which stands for “individualized management for patient-centered targets.”
The center’s community health workers, or C.H.W.s — seven now, but there will be 30 next year — visit some of Penn Medicine’s poorest and sickest patients: people who live in high-poverty neighborhoods, are hospitalized or have two chronic diseases, and either have Medicaid or no insurance at all. Since they began seeing patients in 2011, they’ve treated 1,800 of them. They expect to work with that number every year starting in 2015.
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenberg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim..._type=blogs&_r=0]
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