December 12, 2018 – jCHIP

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Anchor lead: A comprehensive approach to healthcare benefits all, Elizabeth Tracey reports

A program known as J-ChiP, for Johns Hopkins Community Partnership, not only saves millions of dollars in healthcare costs for people with chronic illness, it creates an entire community of caring around them. That’s according to Scott Berkowitz, the study’s lead author.

Berkowitz: We were really excited about putting together a large team of people from Hopkins, community based organizations, hospitals, ambulatory clinics, skilled nursing facilities. We were able to improve the care for Medicaid and Medicare patients and also to reduce the cost of that care. What we were most excited about was our ability to bring on board a new generation of workforce team members, care managers, community health workers, neighborhood navigators, health behavior specialists, transition guides, patients and families, and work with them as they transitioned back to their community. :32

Berkowitz says the community health workers and others embedded in the neighborhood are pivotal to the success of the program. The study was published recently in JAMA Open. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.