|
Closing the Gap Initiatives
- The Harlem Palliative Care Network (HPCN)
program of the North General Hospital
In response to the disparities between pain management
and end-of-life care between African-Americans and white
Americans, last year North General Hospital launched the Harlem Palliative
Care Network (HPCN), a program developed in conjunction
with Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center and Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
-
Prevention and Control of Hypertension and Diabetes in an Underserved
Population Through Community Outreach and Disease Management: A Plan of Action - Joseph C. Gerber, RPh, PhD, and David L. Stewart, MD, MPH
The Baltimore Alliance for the Prevention and Control of
Hypertension and Diabetes was established in January 1998 to promote care to the
underserved community of West Baltimore, Maryland, and to improve outcomes of
hypertension and diabetes. Based at the University of Maryland School of
Medicine, the Baltimore Alliance comprises a community health worker program, a
church-based education and screening effort, managed care and pharmaceutical
company (Hoechst Marion Roussel) partners, a health policy and services
research group, and inpatient/ outpatient clinical care sites in the health
system.
-
Soft Touch with High Tech
Caring for Medicaid and other low income patients is often expensive, due to
their high incidence of disease; internal and external barriers; stressful
environments; and unfamiliarity with the importance of prevention, early
reporting of symptoms and compliance with therapy. However, a strategic plan
with "Soft touch and High tech" includes trained community health
workers to work directly with clients; culturally designed health education
programs in key areas such as breast feeding, self breast examination, smoking
cessation; and case management programs for adult on-set diabetes, hypertension,
and cholesterol etc. A critically important high tech tool is an interactive
computerized registry to track and monitor outcomes for immunizations;
hypertension; diabetes; CHD; smoking cessation; and other patient outcomes with
a variety of patient negative and positive behaviors, diseases and disorders.
-
The Urban Health-NET
The Urban Health-NET will focus on providing health education to the
residents of the urban underserved communities; training community health
workers (CHW) through a distance leaming (DL) program: tracking health concerns;
and generating health data profiles. The network would also give doctors and
staff in area hospitals and health centers the connectivity that would
ultimately result in an integrated medical record for over 200,000 Medicaid
recipients and low-income citizens of Baltimore's Empowerment Zone. One of the
major goals of the project is to provide the clinical professionals, serving the
most disadvantaged citizens of our community, access to the Internet, E-mail,
clinical information systems, library information, patient information and
medical research data bases.
-
The Urban Technology Initiative
The Harlem Park - Lafayette Square Technology Initiative is a new concept in
vocational training. It is a collaborative effort to design, develop and implement
a comprehensive system of recruiting, screening, educating and counseling with
selective interventions to motivate and train youth in basic survival skills,
personal presentation, motivational skills, Internet applications and the latest
high technology.
|