Dallas hospital has a plan which reduces unpaid ER visits

[dixiegrrrrl]

Excellent article, and what they are doing is what used to be done back in 70's before social programs were axed.

Snip:

High utilizers are not a new problem at 872-bed Parkland Memorial, one of the 10 biggest hospitals in the United States........These days, its emergency room overflows with injuries and illnesses large and small: people with bullet wounds and heart attacks, strokes and pneumonia, and also chronically ill patients with nowhere else to go, for whom Parkland’s emergency room is a refuge from their disordered lives. And then there were patients whose medical emergencies could easily have been prevented with regular medical care, or housing or decent food.

Snip:

About 85 percent of the patients at Parkland are uninsured or on Medicaid; the hospital spent $871 million on uncompensated care last year, which accounts for over half its budget and more than 2 percent of all the unpaid hospital care provided in the United States. The unpaid bills arise because only two-thirds of Dallas’s adult residents have health insurance of any kind, the lowest coverage rate of any big city in the country.
It also launched an innovative new initiative that would reset the hospital’s ledger by creating a safety net for the city’s most vulnerable citizens.

Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (or PCCI) was a joint effort with community partners such as homeless shelters and food pantries to build a network of what was hoped would eventually be hundreds of community-based social services around Dallas County, with Parkland Memorial at the center of it.
A sophisticated software platform would enable the hospital to easily refer homeless people discharged from its emergency room to shelters and pantries, and to let social workers at those places see what their clients were doing: whether they were filling their prescriptions, or getting healthy food, or had a place to sleep, or money for the bus. It would be so much cheaper to meet those needs outside the medical system than to pay for the consequences inside it. Two years into the program, evidence is mounting that PCCI is working.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/18/parkland-dallas-frequent-flier-hospital-what-works-216108