Despite the hospital’s top-of-the-line care, leaders at Children’s Medical Center Dallas felt the facility wasn’t making enough of an impact in its community. So, to improve outreach, the hospital has created a wellness program that help patients with issues ranging from nutrition to housing concerns.
To determine the best way to better reach the community, the hospital enlisted veteran industry executive Peter Roberts and Elizabeth Stefanski of the Business Innovation Factory to work alongside the hospital’s CEO Chris Durovich, according to an article from Forbes.
“We wanted to understand why world-class treatment wasn’t having the desired impact,” Stefanski told Forbes.
Stefanski’s team examined hospital records and found 32 families, each of which had at least one member with a chronic condition and about half of which frequented the emergency department for primary care. In studying these families, the team found that they did not think about health specifically all that often, and instead were more concerned about general wellness, according to the article. The team also found that “first generation changemakers” could be empowered to help people interact with the healthcare system in more meaningful ways, according to the article.
With a greater understanding of the people the hospital served, the team developed an assessment tool, which they deemed the “family well-being quotient,” to better gauge overall well-being of patients, according to the article. Families were evaluated every two weeks over the course of three months, according to Forbes, and they were given their own wellness activities to try at home, focusing on nutrition and education.
Because the initial program was effective in improving well-being among its participants, it was later expanded to include navigators, who were retrained to look beyond patient symptoms and to overall well-being, according to the article. The navigators will help families set goals to improve their physical and mental well-being, like, for example, helping them find the right person to help with a rodent problem in their homes.
“It’s critically important that we look beyond the care we deliver in the hospital,” Roberts told Forbes. “We have to engage people where they live and the communities that serve them.”
- here’s the Forbes article