Q&A
Improving collaboration between H+H hospitals and community health centers
0:30:09
·
175 sec
Council Member Salamanca inquires about how board members can advocate for better interaction and communication between H+H hospitals and community health centers. Both nominees offer their perspectives on improving collaboration.
- Dr. Espiritu emphasizes strengthening clinician-to-clinician contacts and improving electronic data sharing systems.
- Vanessa Rodriguez highlights the importance of board members understanding community health centers and facilitating meetings between hospital presidents and these centers.
- Both nominees stress the significance of ensuring continuous patient care and reducing unnecessary ER visits through improved collaboration.
Rafael Salamanca, Jr.
0:30:09
My last question is, I know that the goal of community health centers is to prevent their patients from going into hospitals, right, to the ERs, vice versa.
0:30:20
How how can you as a board member advocate and work with your work with HAC in your local hospitals to work with the community community based organizations or community health centers to have a better interaction or communication with one another.
0:30:38
I don't think many of them speak.
0:30:40
Often.
Michael Espiritu
0:30:41
Yeah.
0:30:42
I think that's yeah.
0:30:43
I I agree with you.
0:30:44
That's important to strengthen those ties and collaborate.
0:30:47
You know?
0:30:50
Certainly, clinician to clinician is often a point of contact that happens outside of any sort of health system barrier that I think is important to maximize on improving our electronic data sharing, you know.
0:31:14
And now I believe HSC uses, for the most part, Epic, which is a which is a widely used electronic medical record system, which a lot of other hospital systems, a lot of other clinics and practices are used in maximizing those capabilities where you can share information among each other, make referrals, contact other specialties, and so that a patient moving from one place to another doesn't have to isn't necessarily totally unknown to the place, the clinic or provider taking care of them.
Vanessa Rodriguez
0:31:53
So I as because I my background is working in the community health center, me being on the board, I I think that just working with the board members to understand the importance of collaboration and actually going in and seeing what where the community health centers are in the community of each of of the hospitals.
0:32:18
Setting some meetings, whether it's 101, just to understand and work with also work with the hospital presidents so that they also know which community health centers are around.
0:32:33
And where the referrals are going to.
0:32:37
So I think I think really if my background in community health center work coming onto the board can bring that to them so that they understand how important it is.
0:32:51
And it's not just, you know, sitting on the board and voting of what is really getting out there and knowing not only the hospital setting, but we wanna make sure that patients are getting the continuous care and not coming to the ER.
