Arizona CEAL: Linking Social Care With Healthcare Systems to Address SDOH

Conditions studied

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), Hypertension, Diabetes Mellitus, Hypercholesterolaemia

About this study

The goal of the Arizona Community Engagement Alliance (AZ-CEAL) will be to combine social care with healthcare programs. The study will be connecting selected patients from clinics with trained community health workers (CHW) who will assist participants in getting the help that is needed for their health such as transportation needs, accessing healthy food, health information, accessing good health care, job opportunities, and housing. The study will collect information from both the patients and the health care systems to test how effectively the care plan works over time.

Interventions

• Other: Community Health Worker intervention — CHWs with knowledge of local community resources will address social needs through through a IVR platform. Both CHWs and participants can access each other through the IVR system. Patients are observed repeatedly so that measurements are nested within members. We will recruit participants into the closed cohort prior to the sequential roll-out of the intervention to ensure individual-level informed consent and patient-reported data. Recruiting individuals before the intervention is rolled into the clinic (cluster) enables both concurrent comparisons of participants receiving care across clinics as well as pre-post comparisons of individual level (patient-reported) data in addition to passive data collection at a system or clinic level. Primary Data collected through patient reported surveys and passive EMR collection will occur at baseline and 6 months. Patients may opt-in to additional data collection at 12, 18, 24, 36 month time points.
• Other: Usual Care — Participants (patients) do not have CHWs addressing social issues and HRSNs within the healthcare system. The healthcare personnel act upon the identified social issues independently or with assistance from local clinic resources as usual. The social drivers of health are assessed by phone interview as part of annual population health assessments and entered into the Electronic Medical Records system and that in turn informs the healthcare provider.

Primary outcomes

• Change in Healthcare utilization (Baseline, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months)