The ‘Frequent Flier’ Program That Grounded a Hospital’s Soaring Costs | Hacker News Reader

The ‘Frequent Flier’ Program That Grounded a Hospital’s Soaring Costs

politico.com

Some folks (nonprofits and gov types) in the District of Columbia have long wanted to do something like this data sharing for the breadth and depth of social services. But we immediately ran into "We can't because of FERPA and HIPAA." We also ran into "we can't because (fill in the blank with a BS reason)." The latter a lot.

What there wasn't in DC is what there was in Dallas: A wholly committed leader and an environment that made collaboration and connecting super appealing. It would be interesting to know more about the behind-the-scenes work that took place to make this project work. That information would benefit organizations and governments across the US.

Note: DC does have a "frequent flyer" effort for those using 911 services. Don't want to suggest nothing good is being done.

Sounds like the approach taken in every other country that has a national health service.

No, this one here is way, way more extensive. No country I know of directly connects e.g. hospitals and food banks or homeless shelters like here.

Some hospitals are even going further than this: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/29/4829940...

It's cheaper to just pay for a patient's apartment rent than keep treating disease caused by exposure.

I took a training and became certified as a Community Health Worker, which is who you would put in place between the hospital, community resources, and the person needing them. Hospitals are slowly learning to partner with agencies with CHWs or hire their own, because resolving the causes of health problems due to the imperfections of society/economy/etc is indeed more efficient and cheaper in the long run than repetitively treating the symptoms. I was passionate during the training, but can't see myself actually settling for the typical $30k salary. Given this reality, most CHWs do it because of passion and have other roles/duties that increase their salary to something actually liveable.

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