The May 18, 2021 session of Duke Medicine LEADS featured Susan Spratt, MD, presenting, "Creating a Statewide Social Network to Improve Health Equity: NCCare360."
Here are pearls and takeaways from the session:
- If you build it...they will NOT come unless you have collaboration, buy-in, and an agreed upon easy operational workflow from every member of the team.
- Before implementing a large-scale improvement project, there are many planning steps that need to be undertaken and many questions that all stakeholders need to be on the same page about. To implement this project on social drives of health screening, the following things needed to be agreed on:
- What questions will you ask?
- Which patients will you ask?
- Who will ask the questions?
- In what location (waiting area? Nurse intake? Patient room?)
- Who does the data entry? (Nurse? Physician? Social Worker?)
- Who will use NCCare360 to find resources for patients with social determinants of health?
- Does everyone know where to document? Review? Pull in?
- Does everyone know about the MyChart questionnaire for social factors? - Food assistance and Housing & Shelter are the areas of need that receive most referrals currently, but this is also because these are the areas that are screened for most commonly. You are not going to find out an area of need if you don't ask!
- If you are interested in championing this effort in your clinic, the above list of questions is a good framework to ensure suitability.
Learn more about NCCARE360 (Duke NetID required)
Duke Medicine Learning, Education, and Discussion Series (LEADS) takes place each Tuesday at 12 p.m. Learn more and see schedule of upcoming sessions.
