Since its creation over a decade ago, Atlanta Regional Collaborative for Health Improvement (ARCHI) has convened over 130 metro Atlanta organizations for discussion and collaboration on improving health outcomes. On Nov. 14, nearly 300 attendees packed the Decatur Conference Center for an update on the State of Metro Atlanta Health in the wake of a year of public health funding cuts and uncertainty.
“We can’t just use our existing systems and think that it’s going to change over time,” said Shannon Sale of Grady Health System, who serves as ARCHI’s chief strategy officer. “We’ve been able to show that when we make the right investments that we bend the cost curve, that we improve quality.”
Better health outcomes go hand in hand with better social outcomes, according to ARCHI. The coalition is concerned about more than just clinical healthcare, taking a holistic view of health that includes factors like education, access to health insurance, reliable transportation, food insecurity, housing, income and more.
“We know that if we can help stabilize housing, health and other social determinants, their economic outlook is at least improving,” ARCHI Executive Director Jeff Smythe said in an interview with Atlanta Way 2.0.
In order to measure health outcomes, ARCHI tracks the following data indicators: years of life lost before age 75, preventable emergency room visits, hospital discharges for major cardiovascular diseases and emergency room visit rate for diabetes related causes.
ARCHI aims to facilitate collaboration between sectors that have historically operated independently, but all contribute to a person’s overall health outcomes. In 2020, the organization launched Community Resource Hubs to create a patient-centered care network of housing, nutrition, income and transportation services. The hubs are multi-sector networks of resources that “invert the burden of navigating a complex and siloed system of care” by coordinating services to address patients’ health needs in a way that maximizes the impact of all services.
Community health workers communicate between multiple sectors in order to surround patients in a network of care and services. In order to implement Community Resource Hubs, health systems like Emory, Grady and Mercy Care employed community health workers beginning in 2021. ARCHI is currently working with a statewide coalition that is trying to fund these community health workers with Medicaid.
In an interview with Atlanta Way 2.0, Smythe explained what it means to be a community health worker in a Community Resource Hub: “You’re talking to the clinical team, but you’re also then working cross-sector with a lot of different nonprofits that are tackling different social determinants of health. So, folks who are in housing, folks who are in food security, folks who are in employment, folks who are in legal services.”
Smythe explained that high numbers of preventable ER visits, for example, may indicate one area that could be improved by more care coordination between service providers. He said Community Resource Hubs have been an impactful tool to improve overall health outcomes, citing double-digit decreases in blood pressure, fewer emergency room visits, improved nutrition, and more.
“What health systems are realizing is that unless they think about those social needs and social determinants, they will continue to see the same folks kind of spiraling and cycling in and out [of emergency rooms],” Smythe said.
He continued: “What makes us really excited is when these different groups are able to connect dots together and work together, and then we can see outcomes improving. And we think these cross-sector approaches are going to ultimately really improve economic mobility as well.”
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