Opportunities in COVID-19 Vaccine Access and Equity

May 4th, 2021
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While COVID-19 vaccine eligibility has expanded and supply has increased, data show that access to vaccines are not equitable throughout California’s communities.

Health care leaders are looking to work together differently as their vaccination efforts shift from trying to meet demand through mass vaccination sites to targeted interventions that address the needs and concerns of high-risk communities and vaccine-hesitant individuals.

In late April, PBGH’s California Quality Collaborative (CQC) hosted a closed roundtable discussion for health plans, provider groups and California state agency representatives to discuss challenges and success stories in their efforts to distribute COVID-19 vaccines and support equitable vaccine distribution for under-resourced populations. Five key actions stakeholders need to take emerged from the conversation:

1. Invest internally in policies supporting equity. During the past year, many organizations worked to improve internal processes that would better enable them to serve the diverse needs of their members and staff. L.A. Care Health Plan, the nation’s largest public health plan with nearly 2.2 million members, for example, developed a set of more robust internal policies to address diversity and inclusion, as well as programs designed to minimize barriers in working with minority or women-owned businesses, an approach described in the Clinical Improvement Network Connections spring 2021 publication.

2. Facilitate real-time data sharing. All groups agreed that, while there had been investments in data-sharing that facilitated collaboration to distribute and ensure access to vaccines, there were still gaps between health care delivery systems, public health and community-based organizations in terms of the accuracy of, and timeliness with which, essential clinical data was shared. As we begin to recover from the pandemic work should be done to ensure real-time data-sharing, especially between the California Immunization Registry and health information exchanges and organizations not traditionally part of health care information exchanges.

3. Provide clear, consistent and trusted communication. It was extremely important for all entities to streamline, test and regularly deliver communications campaigns to stakeholders, including community members, provider groups and member patients.

4. Leverage trusted relationships from primary care providers. Primary care providers were unable to play a significant role in the early days of vaccine distribution, often because mass vaccination sites were prioritized so individual practices received limited vaccine supply or were unprepared to accommodate the stringent storage requirements. With vaccine distribution having stabilized, there is an opportunity to tap into the primary care provider community, which is positioned to leverage long-standing patient relationships and play an important role in vaccination efforts. Increasing primary care’s role in COVID-19 vaccine administration may prove extremely effective in reaching vaccine-hesitant or skeptical patients.

5. Sustain new and strengthened partnerships. Overall, there was a recognition that the public health emergency and response has illuminated how effective cross-sector collaboration between health plans, public health departments, provider groups and community-based organizations can be at solving urgent problems when working together. Now, there is a question about how partnering groups can continue to collaborate while finding ways to become more efficient.

 

COVID-19 Vaccine Resources

 

Addressing Social Determinants of Health Essential to Reining in Health Care Costs

January 11th, 2021
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Health care’s exorbitant costs can never be controlled without fundamentally shifting society’s focus toward the underlying social and economic conditions that disproportionately contribute to ill-health. That was the message former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Donald Berwick gave to large employer members of the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH) during a January 7 webinar.

“I’ve lost patience with marginal change. I don’t think it’s going to work,” said Berwick, a pediatrician who led CMS for a year-and-a-half during the Obama administration and who has been a leading voice for health care reform for over four decades. “We continue to confiscate resources in health care that we don’t deserve and aren’t using properly from other sectors that badly need those resources. It’s time for some big thinking.”

The Shadow of Racism and Poverty

In a presentation subtitled “The Moral Determinants of Health,” Berwick hammered home the need to tackle systemic issues like disparities in income, education, food access, housing security and community structure. He pointed to extensive and long-standing evidence showing the outsized impact these factors have on care access, outcomes, health status and ultimately, cost.

In one example, Berwick noted that individuals who’ve been subjected to at least four adverse childhood experiences (ACE) face dramatically higher risks for nine out the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. They’re also 10 times more likely to experience mental illness and 11 times more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, he said. ACEs can include experiencing violence, abuse or neglect, witnessing violence, or living in a household with substance misuse, mental health problems or parental separation due to incarceration.

The COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated the country’s long-standing health inequities, he noted, particularly as they relate to people of color, with black Americans dying of the virus at a rate three-to-four times higher than whites.

‘Fixing the Road’

According to Berwick, unless efforts are made to move upstream to address social and economic challenges and reallocate a portion of the dollars now flowing into health care toward housing, education, food, criminal justice reform and the like, rising costs and widening disparities will continue to be hallmarks of the U.S. health system.

Berwick went on to outline his personal vision for health care transformation in the U.S., components of which include making health care universally available. He also stressed other priorities, such as ending hunger and homelessness, restoring American leadership on climate change and restoring the credibility of democratic institutions.

He noted that PBGH has been an “extremely important force and presence” in efforts to reform health care for decades and applauded the organization’s willingness to engage seriously in pursuit of solutions. Nonetheless, he said, employers generally have largely remained “bystanders” in efforts to address the social determinants of health and challenged purchasers to consider how they can affect change.

“You’re concerned about your health care costs as an employer and the costs for your employees, so connect the dots,” he said. “With 18% of our GDP and $3.5 trillion a year, health care is running a repair shop. But nobody’s fixing the road.”

The webinar, which includes a panel of health care purchasers sharing their organizations’ approach to addressing social determinants of health can be viewed in full below.

Presentation