Student Hotspotting: Teaching the Interprofessional Care of Complex Patients.

PROBLEM: Individuals with complex health and social needs drive much of the total cost of care. Addressing these individuals' needs and decreasing costs requires interprofessional teams, called "hotspotters," who engage with communities with high utilization. Training health professions students to succeed in the hotspotting approach may benefit trainees, academic health centers (AHCs), and communities. APPROACH: The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers and the Association of American Medical Colleges launched the Interprofessional Student Hotspotting Learning Collaborative in 2014. The goal was to train health professions students working in interprofessional teams at U.S. AHCs to meet the needs of complex patients, providing home visits and intensive case management for up to five patients over six months. The authors report themes from 20 reflections from the five-student Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) team. OUTCOMES: Across 10 sites, 57 students participated during June-December 2014. The review of the VCU experience demonstrated that the hotspotting program was successful in teaching students how social determinants affect health and the benefits of interprofessional teamwork for addressing the unmet health and social needs of complex patients. Key elements that students identified for improvement were more program structure; protected time for program activities; and formalized processes for recruiting, retaining, and transitioning patients. NEXT STEPS: Future iterations of the program should strengthen the curriculum on caring for complex patients, provide protected time or academic credit, and formally integrate teams with primary care. A larger study evaluating the program's impact on patients, health systems, and communities should be undertaken.

Frequent emergency department visitors are frequent primary care visitors and report unmet primary care needs.

A small percentage of emergency department (ED) visitors account for a disproportionate portion of ED visits. Little is known about their relationships with their primary care providers (PCPs). This study compares frequent and infrequent ED visitors' primary care utilization and perceptions of primary care access, continuity, and connectedness and examines primary care utilization and perceptions as predictors of ED use. Data were obtained from 2 cross-sectional studies of psychosocial predictors of high levels of utilization at 2 urban hospitals. Data included age, sex, race/ethnicity, number and type of chronic conditions, self-rated health, and number of primary care and ED visits in the previous 12 months. Participants also answered 8 primary care access, continuity, and connectedness items. Participants with frequent ED visits (N = 70) were younger (43.24 vs 48.34, P = .020), more likely to be African American (61.4% vs 41.8%, P < .001), had a significant chronic illness burden (5.83 vs 2.83 chronic conditions, P < .001), and were more likely to report fair or poor health (65.7% vs 50.4%, P = .009). Frequent ED users were as likely as infrequent users to have a usual source of care, and reported similar primary care access, relationship length, and likelihood of provider knowing them well. Although making twice as many primary care visits, these participants were less likely to report that they could get what they need from their PCP (76.12% vs 92.53%, P < .001). Despite similar primary care access and continuity, frequent ED visitors are less likely to report that they get what they need from their PCPs. Further research should investigate their needs and how primary care can best provide high-value care to this complex population.

The Core of Care Management: The Role of Authentic Relationships in Caring for Patients with Frequent Hospitalizations.

In the movement to improve the health of patients with multiple chronic conditions and vulnerabilities, while reducing the need for hospitalizations, care management programs have garnered wide attention and support. The qualitative data presented in this paper sheds new light on key components of successful chronic care management programs. By going beyond a task- and temporal-based framework, this analysis identifies and defines the importance of "authentic healing relationships" in driving individual and systemic change. Drawing on the voices of 30 former clients of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, the investigators use qualitative methods to identify and elaborate the core elements of the authentic healing relationship-security, genuineness, and continuity-a relationship that is linked to patient motivation and active health management. Although not readily found in the traditional health care delivery system, these authentic healing relationships present significant implications for addressing the persistent health-related needs of patients with frequent hospitalizations. (Population Health Management 2016;19:248-256).

Generating hypotheses about care needs of high utilizers: lessons from patient interviews.

Informed by a largely secondary and quantitative literature, efforts to improve care and outcomes for complex patients with high levels of emergency and hospital-based health care utilization have offered mixed results. This qualitative study identifies psychosocial factors and life experiences described by these patients that may be important to their care needs. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 patients of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers' Care Management Team. Investigators coded transcripts using a priori and inductively-derived codes, then identified 3 key themes: (1) Early-life instability and traumas, including parental loss, unstable or violent relationships, and transiency, informed many participants' health and health care experiences; (2) Many "high utilizers" described a history of difficult interactions with health care providers during adulthood; (3) Over half of the participants described the importance to their well-being of positive and "caring" relationships with primary health care providers and the outreach team. Additionally, the transient and vulnerable nature of this complex population posed challenges to follow-up, both for research and care delivery. These themes illuminate potentially important hypotheses to be explored in more generalizable samples using robust and longitudinal methods. Future work should explore the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences among "high utilizers," and the different types of relationships they have with providers. Investigators should test new modes of care delivery that attend to patients' trauma histories. This qualitative study was well suited to provide insight into the life stories of these complex, vulnerable patients, informing research questions for further investigation.