Building Trust in Communities

So, Neil, welcome. I'm going to ask you your first question, which is, tell us what your strategies are to helping communities of care, why you think they have been successful or challenging. I believe our strategies where they are successful are successful partly because we're using folks from the community, people that they trust, to assist in running these various So, we have about 45 different community-based programs being run that address all sorts of what I consider the social determinants of health. They may deal with health screening. They may deal with trip hazards in the home. They may deal with diabetes or cardiac disease or some of the other typical chronic conditions that you see. But what we found is that by working with trusted community members, folks from their local churches or the local synagogues or their local individual community centers that they trust, that look like them, that live in the community, that sound like them, they're more apt to participate in the programs that we try to develop. We've also found that we need to modify the language we use based on the communities we serve. And we serve a very broad spectrum of patients from inner city, uninsured, underinsured, all the way through very well-heeled individuals who live in the far-off suburbs who have income but don't necessarily have the education necessary or the understanding of what they need to do to to live longer and healthier lives. I think where we have had challenges quite honestly is getting a consistent response from some of the community members. And I think that's largely due to communication challenges and the fact that not everyone has a permanent address or a telephone number that they maintain for a long period of time. They move around, they oftentimes will start a program And given the difficult circumstances in which they live, they aren't able to continue. And in some cases, they're dealing with some of the very difficult, basic issues of, you know, having transportation, having electricity, having the ability to safely get from one place to another. So what we try to do is work with all of that. We've created mobile health units, which also go out to the community to create an ease of access and convenience. So it's all those different things that seem to work. And unfortunately, there's not a magic pill and there's not a one size fits all solution to all of these circumstances. So we're constantly trying to modify and change as the circumstances of the community we're trying to address. you