A look into NYC Health+Hospital/ Community Care’s promising new program poised to better equip its workforce to provide transformative care in the community
Introduction
What does the future of community-based healthcare look like? NYC Health+Hospitals/Community Care (“Community Care”) is evolving as a leader in improving healthcare delivery through growing a more prepared, effective, passionate, and understanding workforce in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Reaching outside of the hospitals and clinics, Community Care is dedicated to supporting system-wide healthcare transformation efforts and proactive implementation of a population health care management strategy, one that aims to address avoidable human suffering by focusing on effective clinical integration and providing the highest quality of care and support to patients as they return to the community.
Community Care has seen great success so far in harnessing innovative methods that improve patient outcomes, engagement, and experience within their communities. Examples of strategies being used by outreach workers, care coordinators, and Nurses include motivational interviewing to teach chronic disease self-management strategies, screening to identify the resources necessary to reduce patient barriers, practicing interdisciplinary team-based collaborations, and improving the patient experience.
Embedded within these new innovations and successes that Community Care has made so far is a revolutionary new training program, the Care Management Academy (CMA).
In response to the rapidly changing healthcare delivery landscape and the new focus on providing compassionate, effective patient care in the community, the CMA was designed in 2018 as an experimental eight- to ten-week training program. It placed participants in a blended learning curriculum comprising both sophisticated eLearning content and action-oriented, in-person class workshops. Through the blended learning model, emphasis on experiential learning over rote learning, and a hands-on approach that involves a variety of real-life human-centered learning scenarios, students graduate equipped with the most effective, human-centered strategies for improving patient outcomes, engagement, and experience.
Our Role
To deliver the CMA, Community Care hosts its blended learning trainings and manages registration, tracking, and reporting on HWapps, a customized Learning Management System (LMS) designed and developed by us. On this customized HWapps LMS, participants in the eight-week program participate in 25 interactive eLearning training modules and register for their weekly in-person workshops. Training topics range from Care Coordination fundamentals, effective communication strategies, motivational interviewing, mental health conditions, health coaching and electronic medical records, chronic disease management, and crisis management and stress. Since its inception, the CMA has graduated two cohorts of 25 participants.
To set the program up for long-term sustainability, eligible participants have the ability to participate in an additional two-week “Train-the-Trainer” extension after the eight weeks are complete to qualify them as CMA trainers for future cohorts.
The third and fourth cohorts are scheduled for early 2020.
Impact
What Community Care is building is exceptional for many reasons. With a vision of improving patient outcomes, investing in the workforce, and building an infrastructure for future sustainability of the model, Community Care is successfully transforming concept into action with measurable results. Ms. Jennifer Melendez-Suarez Associate Executive Director for Workforce Development and Training stated, “In our pursuit of excellence and our mission to deliver compassionate health services with dignity and respect to all, our longstanding hope is to recruit, train, empower, and retain the highest quality workforce that will wholeheartedly seek to protect, promote, and improve the health of individuals and communities in New York City.”
At an institutional level, the packaging of a Care Management Training into a standardized model is a major achievement. This creative and forward-thinking model, emphasizing blended- and scenario-based learning, is poised to boost engagement, knowledge retention, experience, motivation, and ownership in the graduates of the Academy. According to Bielka Feliz, 2019 Class Valedictorian, “the expression of what the academy has meant to me will not end [here] but will be reflected in my work moving forward and my reawakened commitment to not only my department but to the patient experience as a whole.” The Academy is creating a learning culture for healthcare professionals that will provide employees validation, support in the work that they do, recognition, and foster their development, personally and professionally. Through this, Community Care is guaranteeing they can continue to provide these world-class Care Management services far into the future.
Learn More Today about the Care Management Academy.
To connect with Community Care and learn more about the Care Management Academy, please contact CommunityCareLearning@nychhc.org.
