More and more hospitals are partnering with churches and religious groups in the hopes that improving the health of the congregations' members will lead to reduced healthcare costs, reports Kaiser Health News.
A main component of the hospital-church partnership is patient education, according to the article. Hospital-trained liaisons educate members of their congregations about healthy living habits and ways to prevent disease.
For instance, Seventh-day Adventist faith-based Loma Linda University Medical Center in California offers free health screening and education to members of local churches. An outreach program to a Temecula church revealed that the area's Spanish-speaking community wasn't accessing available dementia services, Dora Barilla, Loma Linda's director of community health development, told KHN.
Although faith-based hospitals have traditionally partnered with churches, more non-faith-based hospitals and health systems are getting in on the act.
For instance, non-faith-based Inova Health System in Northern Virginia collaborates with various religious groups on health promotion and prevention through its Congregational Health Partnership program. To serve multi-cultural and multi-faith communities, Inova has a different program manager work with Hispanic, Muslim, Korean, Vietnamese, and African-American groups, notes KHN.
These religious partnerships have proven successful at keeping church members healthy and reducing healthcare costs. For instance, Methodist Le Bonheur hospital system has saved $4 million, slashed mortality by 50 percent, and reduced readmissions by 20 percent by working with 376 congregations, as FierceHealthcare previously noted.
"We're saving a lot of money," Gary Gunderson, Methodist's senior vice president, told KHN. "We're mobilizing and aligning hundreds of people that we couldn't pay," he said of the 500 volunteer church liaisons that work with the hospital.
For more information:
- read the KHN article