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Electronic Health Records Critical to Chronic Disease Management

Hernandez-Cancio, director of Health Equity, Families USA, gave that message at the Latino Health Equity Conference last week.
June 22, 2015

The best way to discover who’s not getting adequate chronic disease care is mining electronic health records, according to Hernandez-Cancio, director of Health Equity, Families USA, who spoke at Familias en Accion’s Latino Health Equity Conference last week.

“We haven’t figured out how to exploit (the data) for the good of the patient,” said Hernandez-Cancio, who works to enhance and elevate healthcare advocacy and activism in communities of color across the nation. “It’s about being able to find data that already exists,” she said, adding that there are “two universes of data. Please don’t underestimate stories. Soft data needs to be taken seriously.”

The Health Equity Learning Community panel at the conference was hosted by Eastern Oregon Coordinated Care Organization, an Oregon CCO serving 196,000 members in 12 counties, 10 of which are “frontier counties,” meaning the population is scattered with fewer than six people per square mile.

Megan Lee Gomeza, project manager at Lifeways, Inc. who chairs Malheur County’s community advisory council, said a third of its population is Latino with 52.8 percent of the Medicaid population identifying as Hispanic, while 25 percent speak a language other than English at home.

“I came to talk about health and everybody is talking about healthcare,” said Tony LookingElk, regional director of the Otto Bremer Foundation in Minneapolis. “Healthcare is a tool toward health.”

He asked the crowd if they believed changes in healthcare would come through evolution. No one raised a hand. Revolution? Arms shot up. “You should challenge every step of how the system works today,” LookingElk said.

Trust trial and error, take risks and don’t make promises unless you are “willing to go to the end of the earth” to deliver them because communities of color have been disappointed too many times, he said. “Invoke all your talent, all your abilities,” to do what you are willing to promise. “This not about goodwill and good intention.”

He told how the Twin Cities’ American Indian community turned around a city of Minneapolis community engagement process that seemed more inclined to get approval rather than feedback.

Asking “what’s important to you?” LookingElk said, will extract the real values of a community so common themes emerge. Minneapolis discovered the element of family needed to be in every program and every request for proposal, giving the city a solid foundation to work on values that were “not going to expire next year.”

In response to a question about trauma-informed care, LookingElk suggested it can be “dangerous” if the care just “dusts off old dilemmas without addressing the pain.” He admitted patients have to go through that pain but “anytime you revisit the past, you’re going to look at who’s to blame.” Jan can be reached at [email protected].

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