 The Healthy Community Partnership, which oversees the HOPE Mobile,
recently learned it was one of 58 recipients of a Small Health Care
Provider Quality Improvement grant and the only one in Illinois. The
grant came through the Health Resources and Services Administration.
The HOPE Mobile has been reaching out to those in need for more than
a decade. It's a clinic on wheels for rural communities in Logan
County. The name HOPE is an acronym for Healthcare, Oral health,
Prevention and Education services.
But until now, the mobile service has focused only minimally on
helping patients manage conditions such as diabetes, high blood
pressure and high cholesterol.
The grant will be used in part to purchase equipment and supplies
that will allow health care workers to use an electronic patient
registry, or EPR.
"The EPR is capable of alerting clinicians about their patients'
well-being, providing outreach to patients, summarizing the
patients' risk factors and generating health management reports,"
says Kristi Lessen, director of the Healthy Community Partnership.
"The technology will enable clinicians and patients to work together
to understand the disease and how they can set goals to better
manage it and avoid complications and unnecessary health care
expenses."
The first year will be spent setting up the new system on the
HOPE Mobile.
Lessen says it's an ideal setting for helping patients manage
their diseases because the patients have become familiar with the
nurses and have developed a trust. Creating a partnership of care is
the logical next step, but the technology to accomplish it hasn't
been accessible for the nonprofit organization until now.
[to top of second column] |
This is also the right community for such a project, Lessen says.
Statistically, Logan County has a higher percentage of diabetes,
high blood pressure and heart attacks than both the state and
national averages. The percentage of overweight and obese residents
is also higher in Logan County than the state average.
"The partnership's commitment to improving chronic illnesses is
demonstrated through the treatment on the HOPE Mobile," Lessen says.
"Creating the healthiest community in America is the vision of the
partnership and can only be achieved through improving the health
and quality of life of the people and communities we serve."
The HOPE Mobile is staffed by Logan County Department of Public
Health nurses and led by Kat Tucholke, a certified family nurse
practitioner from Memorial Physician Service's Family Medical
Center. The service is a component of the Healthy Communities
Partnership, a collaborative organization comprised of dozens of
community agencies. It is supported in part by the Abraham Lincoln
Healthcare Foundation.
[Text from file received from
Healthy
Communities Partnership]
 |
