New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has signed into law a bill establishing a Regional Health Hub program.
The legislation names the Camden Coalition, Trenton Health Team, Greater Newark Healthcare Coalition, and the Health Coalition of Passaic County as New Jersey’s first Regional Health Hubs. Since 2011 these organizations have been Medicaid Accountable Care Organizations, and have now been designated regional hubs.
Regional Health Hubs build upon and leverage previous state investments in public health. Through their positions as health leaders in their communities, the hubs will support the State of New Jersey’s health priorities by providing healthcare data infrastructure and analysis, supporting care management, and convening community stakeholders in close coordination with the state’s Office of Medicaid Innovation.
All four regions have taken a more holistic approach to care by making robust connections to social services and community resources. Projects that began in the ACO Demonstration Project have evolved into four regional collaboratives that integrate, coordinate and align all the disconnected programs aimed at making communities healthier.
In the past year, the four organizations have worked with their partners to address inequities in maternal health outcomes, access to cancer screening and treatment, challenges in access to healthy food, connections between healthcare and the faith community, youth tobacco use prevention, school attendance, improvements to the built environment, and more.
Under this new model, each hub will serve as a local expert and conduit for state health priorities, convene multi-sector partners in their regions to take action on the state’s most urgent health needs, and operate or use a regional health information exchange (HIE) to ensure that health and other data are accessible and useful. “The Regional Health Hub model gives the Camden Coalition and our partners in Trenton, Newark, and Paterson the opportunity to use our collective strengths to improve the health of vulnerable New Jerseyans,” said Kathleen Noonan, chief executive officer of the Camden Coalition, in a statement.
In a July 2019 interview with Healthcare Innovation, Gregory Paulson, Trenton Health Team’s executive director, described his organization as a nonprofit multi-sector collaborative started by two hospital systems, an FQHC and the public health department. It has grown to have 25 staff members and a $4 million annual budget to improve the health and well-being of the greater Trenton community. Its HIE, using the Care Evolution platform, went live in January 2014. The system is not just for document exchange, he said. “It is designed to be a real-time population health platform. It offers a longitudinal view of every patient, but we do a lot of targeted surveillance across the population to alert a primary care practice when their patients are in the hospital or to look at diabetes performance. We do broad-level population analytics to let us understand disease prevalence and associated comorbidities and root causes. All of that is one engine.”
Since its inception, the Trenton Health Team has worked to address social determinants of health and create partnerships among healthcare and community organizations that impact social needs. “For us, how we use technology to better identify and address social needs was a logical next step in our health information technology work,” Paulson said. “When we decided to implement NowPow, we already had the social service partners at the table working with us. We were able to invite them to participate in the vendor selection process and lead deployment of the tool with us, including developing a standardized social determinant screening tool that social workers from across the spectrum all collaborated on and have shared ownership.”
