Partners Healthcare

Today marks the official launch of Mayor Menino’s Boston Moves for Health initiative, which encourages residents across the city to lose one million pounds and walk 10 million miles over the next year. At Partners HealthCare, we are committed to providing a healthier tomorrow for our patients and the communities we serve, and together with our founding hospitals – Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospital – we are committing $100,000 to this program.

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Following a rigorous strategic planning process, Partners Community Health recently identified three priority areas of focus in order to increase our commitment to the communities we serve. These three strategies – enhancing access to health care, building tomorrow’s health care workforce and improving the health and well-being of communities through prevention – will help us meet our goals of positively impacting the overall health of low income and vulnerable people.

Access

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At Partners HealthCare, we’re committed to helping those in the neighborhoods we serve make healthier choices. Recently, we presented a healthy living forum in collaboration with Jeanne Blake of Words Can Work, a series of DVDs and booklets addressing the problems and challenges facing our youth. The forum featured community and legislative leaders (including Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, pictured left) and focused on how to talk with young people about physical fitness, nutrition and healthy weight (see more photos from the event here).

The obesity epidemic is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, more than one third of children in Massachusetts are overweight or obese, and in some communities, that number is as high as half. Through community-based initiatives such as these and others promoting healthy living, we are focusing on our mission of positively impacting the health of present and future generations.

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Partners HealthCare remains committed to making care accessible within the local communities we serve. Last year alone, we invested over $185 million in initiatives designed to aid the underserved, and we are pleased to announce the culmination of a partnership with Lynn Community Health Center that will deepen our commitment to the surrounding community even further.

With substantial support from the federal government and a $3 million dollar grant from Partners and North Shore Medical Center (NSMC), Lynn Community Health Center – the largest provider of primary care in Lynn – is opening a new addition that will enhance access to primary care. Groundbreaking for the project began back in June of 2010, and the expanded space will allow two new primary care teams to pilot innovative approaches to care. Based on the Patient Centered Medical Home Model, these initiatives will emphasize enhanced access to care, patient engagement, coordinated services across the health system and a team-based approach that fully integrates medical and behavioral health care. These teams are designed to deliver lower cost care with high social impact.

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Earlier this year, I wrote about a pilot program at the Lynn Community Health Center that uses text messaging to encourage pregnant women to receive the proper amount of pre-natal care.

The messages were delivered to a group of 25 women, age 22 on average, who often had limited support systems in place and would truly benefit from additional reminders about how to have a healthy pregnancy. These messages were found to give the moms-to-be a feeling of being closely connected to their care team. A majority of the women who participated told us that the text messages also helped them to learn more ways to take care of themselves and their babies. In fact, results of patient surveys and review of the data showed women who got text messages from their clinical team received the recommended level of pre-natal care 9 percent more than other pregnant women who did not get text messages.

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Camp Harbor View (CHV) offers hundreds of Boston’s young people an escape from the city in the hot summer months, a respite from neighborhoods where violence is a factor and a chance to experience the peaceful, natural beauty of Boston’s Harbor Islands. 

We’ve supported the camp since it began, and this year we are deepening our commitment by adding an additional session called – the Health Explorers Camp.

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Dozens of Cambodian youth in Lynn are making positive, healthy choices in their community through a youth program called KAYA.

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Partners HealthCare is working to strengthen and deepen our commitment to the communities we serve. Utilizing our resources and capabilities as a system of hospitals to engage more deeply with our surrounding residents and neighborhoods, we have increased our community health commitment by 18% this past year, investing more than $185 million in programs to help the underserved while building the foundation for future well-being and economic opportunity. Here are some examples of what our commitment to the community looked like in 2010:

• A continuing commitment to the medical and nursing school loan repayment partnership with Bank of America, the Commonwealth and the Mass. League of Community Health Centers brought the total number of primary care providers with loan repayment grants up to 113, providing capacity for more than 200,000 patients

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At Partners HealthCare, using technology to improve patient care isn’t limited to our hospitals. We continue to look for creative and new ways to improve the health of children and adults in our community, outside the walls of our hospitals. Here’s one example. The Boston Business Journal recently wrote: “Someone at Partners HealthCare had a great idea to improve pre-natal care among young women – text them.”

Partners HealthCare’s text-messaging program has been successful in encouraging pregnant women in Lynn to get the proper amount of pre-natal care. In a pilot program, Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) and Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health enrolled 25 pregnant women in a program that offered informational and supportive text messages throughout their pregnancies and two months after their babies were born. The goal was to offer extra support to younger women who often have limited support systems in place, and who would truly benefit from additional reminders about how to have a healthy pregnancy. A recent finding by the Nielsen Company showed text messages as a preferred form of communication among young people, with teens sending and receiving up to 100 texts a day. The women in the Lynn program, age 22 on average, received between one and four text messages per week. Results of patient surveys and review of the data showed women who got text messages from their clinical team received the recommended level of pre-natal care 9% more than other pregnant women who did not get text messages.

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