Crossroad Health Center - OTR

Christopher Kanner, Summer 2016

This summer at Crossroad Health Center, I worked on a variety of projects as part of the Care Coordination team. My primary role was to contact patients with a diagnosis of hypertension to check on their management of their blood pressure and make appointments as needed to ensure that they came to the clinic as often as recommended by their provider. During these calls, I would inquire whether the patient had been taking their medication as directed, if they had been checking their blood pressure at home, and if they had made any changes to diet or exercise habits to better manage their blood pressure. In the process, I gained a much better understanding of the many barriers which can impair adherence to a treatment plan and thus lead to less successful management of hypertension. I also created an updated calling protocol document so that future Care Coordinators could more easily continue these calls. In addition to the hypertension outreach calls that I completed, Care Coordination team members contacted patients to check on their management of asthma and diabetes and to discuss colorectal cancer screening options. We also worked to arrange a Health Fair in an effort to better reach out to the Over The Rhine community.

The majority of the patients seen at Crossroad are insured through Medicaid, Medicare, or uninsured. Many patients that I spoke to had difficulty finding transportation to the clinic or the pharmacy or had simply run out of refills for their prescriptions. Others could not consistently afford their medication or healthy food. Some were focused on dealing with other health concerns. Seeing the barriers that these patients faced, it became clear how even a patient dedicated to following their treatment plan can struggle to manage a chronic condition. In addition to scheduling appointments, I worked to address some of these other concerns by arranging transportation, notifying a provider when a prescription needed to be renewed, contacting pharmacies to verify that refills were available, or helping to schedule appointments with specialists when patients needed referrals.

Scheduling referral appointments was another learning experience. For many patients, it was very difficult to find providers outside of Crossroad who would accept their insurance. Providing this population with the care that they require necessitates a commitment to providing for underserved populations both within and beyond the primary care clinic. For this reason, the Care Coordination team dedicated a large amount of time to scheduling referrals for our patients. Through the experience of working and shadowing at Crossroad Heath Center, I gained a better understanding of their diverse patient population and the many ways in which poverty can impact health. I hope that this knowledge will help me to better serve my future patients with an awareness of the many factors which may impair their ability to manage chronic disease states.