LANES joined healthcare ecosystem peers at this year’s 2023 State of Reform Southern California Health Policy Conference to discuss data sharing standards, the implementation of CalAIM, as well as other policy and health issues affecting how care is delivered to the 10 million patients LANES supports.
Here were some of the top takeaways:
- The implementation of CalAIM (a multi-year plan to transform the Medi-Cal program for a more seamless connection to additional social services), while supported through multiple grant programs, is being challenged by infrastructure issues. Technical assistance vendors have been helpful to organizations supporting Medi-Cal, but panelists shared that issues related to the real-time connection of health data systems remain, such as determining who is financially responsible for critical care coordination supports like ADT notifications.
- Community-based care providers pointed out opportunities to further refine processes and increase resources for enhanced care management (ECM) for children and youth. ECM is designed to enable individuals receiving care to reach out to a single lead care manager. The care manager is responsible for management and coordination of all of the individual’s care services. According to event panelists, today’s ECM processes don’t account for children that might be receiving or require services across multiple counties, potentially creating more burden for care managers or duplicative services.
- A lack of modern technology could be affecting the state’s ability to support individuals facing housing instability and homelessness in an unexpected way. According to one event panelist, Nick Weinmeister, Project Specialist at USC’s Homelessness Policy and Research Institute: “It’s difficult to recruit workers in the housing and homelessness sector, especially young individuals”. He explained how there’s a lack of modern technology that young people expect and want, while wages are “nowhere near where they need to be” to attract those with expertise and skills. He added that there’s a lack of structure to develop the professional homeless service sector.
While there were challenges discussed throughout the event, what was encouraging to the LANES team were the advancements that have been made in normalizing data sharing and addressing barriers so that better patient outcomes could be realized. With many healthcare providers preparing to be in compliance with the Data Exchange Framework starting in January 2024, conferences like these serve as an important milestone for understanding progress and addressing challenges through policy, technology, and healthcare best practices.
