December 5, 2020
It’s hard to stay healthy if you don’t have a place to call home.
That’s what we learned firsthand, when one of our patients came in for his annual wellness visit.
Thanks to Aledade, we’ve been doing a lot more of these AWVs. They give us a chance to have a conversation with our patients that’s not just about the test or procedure or illness they came in for that day. They help us see the full picture of the patient’s health. Thanks to Aledade’s care management trainings and real-time data and analytics from the Aledade app, we know which patients we need to see for an AWV, and how to work with them when they arrive.
Our patient that day was wheelchair bound, so we asked how his social situation was. Sometimes patients in a wheelchair can get to feeling a bit lonely. In the course of the conversation, though, this patient told us that he had recently lost his home. The waiting list for housing assistance stretched out for three years. In the meantime, the only place he could stay was a shed in his friend’s backyard.
As a care management team, we knew we had to do something.
Housing is such an important part of good health. The National Council on Health Care for the Homeless covers a few reasons for this. A clean, dry and safe environment supports good personal hygiene, the storage of medication, and safety from people and the weather. A private space lets a patient establish stable personal relationships, and have good social interactions with other people. Importantly for us as health care professionals, a patient with a place of their own is more likely to stick with a treatment plan, eat meals regularly, and show up on time for appointments. And housing reduces anxiety and the impact of stress-related illnesses.
Aledade’s practice transformation specialist Connie Perkins and I knew that a three-year wait was too long. So we spent countless hours on the phone with the state’s resources for homeless and disabled persons. Tooele is a rural community. We don’t have that many resources for housing, but after a lot of work and some persistence, we did it.
We were able to find housing for this patient in Wendover. Even though Wendover’s a two hour drive away from our town, the patient was thrilled to have a home of his own. He even started looking for work around his new place.
Thanks to an annual wellness visit – supported by the training, technology, and partnership of Aledade – we helped our patient get healthier, by finding a place to call his own.