ChristianaCare will use the grant money on Medicare outreach services.
WILMINGTON – An official from ChristianaCare hopes a new $225,000 grant will help its community health workers serve 150 more patients.
The grant, distributed by the HighmarkDelaware’s BluePrints for the Community program, will fund the first ChristianaCare Community Health Worker program dedicated to offering comprehensive support to eligible Medicare patients throughout the state, ensuring these individuals have access to essential resources and assistance, regardless of their insurance provider.
“The goal is in January to begin recruitment for the position, hire, bring them on, get onboarded, and have them out in the community by March,” said Erin Booker, chief biopsychosocial officer for ChristianaCare. “The team is already feverishly working on all of the different pieces of the workflows and the process.”
A community health worker (CHW) serves as a frontline liaison, helping individuals and families navigate the health, social, and community service systems to promote health and well-being.
The new program will enable ChristianaCare’s CHWs to broaden their outreach to eligible older adults, and the effort will involve conducting screenings to identify the social care needs of these patients.
Referrals will be made through the Unite Us platform, which enables ChristianaCare caregivers to connect patients with vital community resources.
“We’re not new to the world of community health workers; we’re actually the largest employer of community health workers in the state with over 65 in our system, in all different capacities,” Booker said, “But this is a really focused program to serve our Medicare population.”
This is the first time ChristianaCare has received a grant specifically for a community health worker program.
“We’ve been talking about this for months and months and months, probably about a year,” Booker said. “We are a partner and offer a Medicare Advantage plan, and it’s given us a lot of insight into the social complexities of those individuals that we knew from a far away distance, but with the data that we were able to receive and view with the Medicare Advantage plan, it really became very apparent that the complexity of the social needs of those that are in that age range is very prominent.”
Despite the excitement of the ChristianaCare team about the program, Dr. C.D. Casscells, director of the Caesar Rodney Institute’s Center for Health Policy, pushed back on the funding source.
“These monies are the last pittance of the mandatory funds held back from the acquisition of BCBSDe cash reserves of Delawarean’s paid health premiums given to Highmark,” he said, “so in essence this is health premium money extracted from Delawareans supposedly to pay for their health care instead being redirected to Christiana Care through a paid middleman, DCF. A shell game with the funds masquerading as philanthropy. Hardly a good deal for the citizens.”
Nick Moriello, president of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield Delaware, says by addressing health and social needs, the state can work together to create a healthier and more equitable community for all.
“For us, we have a lot of programs that are great, but we don’t have one that really targets this Medicare population,” Booker said, “and so we want to see and pilot this program if we really create impact into their health outcomes, the disparities that we see in health outcomes and their qualities of life by engaging in community health worker support.”
Raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Jarek earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.A. in political science from Temple University in 2021. After running CNN’s Michael Smerconish’s YouTube channel, Jarek became a reporter for the Bucks County Herald before joining Delaware LIVE News.
Jarek can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (215) 450-9982. Follow him on Twitter @jarekrutz
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