Creating better health
Challenge winner gets $1.5M to train medical workers
Lynne Williams, a physician at the Hilltop Community Health Center, Mount Washington, believes outcomes would improve significantly if nonmedical personnel could help patients handle tasks such as booking follow-up appointments and establishing a schedule to take medications.
The opportunity to place workers in those jobs has become a reality with $1.5 million in funding made available through the Healthy Allegheny Challenge.
The winner of the first challenge competition, to be announced Friday, is a proposal to develop training for positions known as community health workers.
Funded by the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, the challenge competition sought solutions to regional health problems from community stakeholders.
The Southwest Pennsylvania Area Health Education Center, or AHEC, where Dr. Williams serves as executive director, led a team of partners including the University of Pittsburgh and several health clinics that submitted the winning proposal.
AHEC will collaborate with clinics and Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health to provide a 100-hour curriculum to train workers and provide them with state certification as community health workers.
The proposal aims to train and hire 24 workers by 2023.
Workers will reside in the communities where they provide assistance and will act as liaisons between patients and providers of medical, dental and mental health treatment.
They will also help connect patients to social services.
When community health workers assist vulnerable populations, “We can wrap around the patients a little bit more,” Dr. Williams said.
“On its own, medical care is not enough to create better health in our communities,” she said.
Besides Hilltop Community Health Center — which provides free and low-cost care to needy residents of city neighborhoods including Beltzhoover and Allentown — other clinics that will be training sites are the Birmingham Free Clinic, South Side; the StoRox Neighborhood Health Council, McKees Rocks; and the Lawrenceville Family Health Center.
Individuals trained through the Healthy Allegheny Challenge proposal will be placed at health and community centers in those neighborhoods.
Besides assisting with medical care issues, community health workers can help individuals secure transportation to appointments and apply for jobs or government benefits, said Mike Bowersox, a program director at AHEC and licensed therapist who works one day a week at the Birmingham Free Clinic.
When people in at-risk neighborhoods don’t get that help, it “fuels disparities in marginalized communities,” he said.
A job as a community health worker can be an entry-level position for high school graduates or a career path for people in social services or other fields who want to become certified, Dr. Williams said. Some become specialized in helping people deal with chronic diseases such as diabetes or with substance abuse.
The Hillman Foundation received 27 proposals for the challenge competition.
“It was as robust as we hoped it would be,” said David Roger, foundation president.
The winner was decided by a panel of 21 judges including local officials, foundations and health care experts.
The funding for training community health workers will be distributed over two to three years during which time the foundation will track results, said Michael Rooney, program officer for the Hillman Family Foundations.