December 13, 2018 – Access to Care

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: One of the biggest barriers for some people with chronic illness is access to care, Elizabeth Tracey reports

‘Social determinants of health’ is one of the most used buzz-phrases currently, identifying someone’s social factors as primary in determining health outcomes. Now a Johns Hopkins program called J-CHiP, led by Scott Berkowitz, provides more data regarding the importance of these factors.

Berkowitz: One of the components of our program for the community-based intervention was the performance of a barriers to care assessment, and it assessed what were the barriers that those patients were facing in terms of accessing care. Things like transportation, food, electricity, paying for the price of medicines and we found very elevated numbers with respect to those questions. Upwards of 40% for our Medicaid population and 20% for our Medicare population were having challenges in terms of meeting a transportation need, for example.  :30

Berkowitz says when these factors are addressed, people are able to manage their chronic medical conditions and improve outcomes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.