Primary Care in Kane County
Found on the Illinois Hospital Association Website. Creating a medical home with a primary care provider who coordinates and is accountable for your care the first step for improving health care
Spearheaded by Rep. Ruth Munson (R-Elgin), community and health care leaders in Kane County are working with Sherman Hospital, Provena Saint Joseph Hospital and IHA to educate the public about free or low-cost care available at federally funded health clinics. They have teamed up to print 100,000 bilingual pamphlets (in English and Spanish) to let people know about the clinics, which provide care, based on ability to pay. The pamphlets include a map to the local clinics.Bill Baar's West Side
Last year, Munson commissioned a study on the uninsured in Kane County and found that people often went to emergency rooms for infant ear infections, minor cuts and burns, and other minor ailments that can be handled in a more timely fashion at clinics that routinely treat these types of cases. Officials hope the informational campaign will help facilitate the creation of medical homes for those without primary care physicians, creating continuity of care and helping reduce unnecessary visits to ERs.
UPDATE: One reason I posted this was the revelation during the All-Kids roll-out of how many eligible families go without care simply because Illinois fails in outreach. See these comments on spontaneous Solutions, and this from Greg Blankenship,
All Kids is targeted at those who aren't Medicaid eligible but nonetheless are uninsured....Whether they uninsured by choice or economic circumstance is a point of contention...
About 1/3 of the uninsured in the country are Medicaid eligible but they don't show up on the roles until they need coverage. Once they go to the emergency room they get signed up for Medicaid. Outreach efforts to these groups do not work well.
It's expensive health care and poor quality health care because it lacks the coordination and continuity that comes from a Medical Home.
5 comments:
This is an excellent idea. Not only does this create a source of medical expertise somewhere in the wide gap between the individual trying to surf webmd.com and a busy doctor who really doesn't appreciate being paged on a weekend, but (by lowering the financial stakes and encouraging people to come in earlier rather than later) it enables a level of preventive healthcare that just makes sense from a public health standpoint. As Poor Richard was recorded as saying more than two centuries ago, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
Does anyone in their right mind think that the federally funded health clinics are anything but understaffed, underfunded, and overburdened already? Sorry, this is disingenuous (if not craven and callous and self serving.) The Kane County crowd isn't dealing forthrightly with health care for the poor and uninsured -- they're merely palming them off. Pretty disgusting, if you ask me.
How is it callous or craven to reach out to people and make them aware of programs they're eligible for?
And instead push them to the most expensive and lowest quality option: the unscheduled ER visit for a non-emergency.
That's substandard health care and bad economics.
If we want to provide health care for kids, offer it in the schools so all kids can easily benefit and minimize time out of class.
For the boomers approaching retirement with expensive and understaffed hospitals, in-school health care also provides more adult role models who can encourage careers in medicine.
anon 2:22 Note this,
Teaming with a network of Elgin-area clergy and local school districts U-46 and 300 to distribute the information throughout the community, the partnership aims to serve as a model for the state.
From Hastert's Press release on Munson's initiative.
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