FirstHealth of the Carolinas’ CARE Suite has been awarded the North Carolina Hospital Association’s Healthier Communities Award. This award recognizes collaborative work by an NCHA member institution to promote health and well-being by addressing an identified need. FirstHealth of the Carolinas received the award July 19 at NCHA’s Summer Membership Meeting.
CARE Suite is an innovative program that identifies and eliminates barriers to improving the health and well-being of patients and the community through collaboration with health care partners and community resources that assist with transportation, housing, utilities, food support, finances and more.
“FirstHealth’s CARE Suite program is a great example of caring for our communities holistically,” said NCHA President and CEO Steve Lawler. “Achieving better health extends beyond the walls of hospitals and requires collaboration to deliver the physical, behavioral, emotional, and social services required to improve lives.”
FirstHealth of the Carolinas serves more than 300,000 people in its primary service area across rural North Carolina. Many of the counties served by FirstHealth have consistently remained either in the bottom decile or bottom half for health outcomes among all counties in North Carolina. In early 2018, FirstHealth leaders launched an initiative to address the non-medical drivers of health outcomes. This initiative uses a whole-person care model and focuses on both medical and non-medical determinants of health.
FirstHealth’s whole-person care model relies on two key assets — About Me Cards and social care support teams. About Me Cards are simple, plain language forms that patients fill out before seeing a provider. These cards allow patients to share their thoughts, goals and struggles. Social support care teams are a resource that FirstHealth providers can direct their patients to for social care support needs. The main entity and the namesake for the program is the Center for Health and Social Care, referred to as the CARE Suite.
Since its development in 2018, all FirstHealth primary care clinics have begun using the About Me Cards. As of December 2022, more than 54,000 About Me Cards had been completed and more than 1,500 referrals had been made to the CARE Suite. The program has also recruited additional care partners and CARE Suite team members to continue to meet the needs of patients and the community.
The FirstHealth CARE Suite is improving patient outcomes, reducing provider burnout by providing a social care support team and leading to substantial health care cost savings. Year-by-year cost comparison for patients who received care through the CARE Suite compared to those who did not demonstrate more than $1 million in cost savings based on reductions in hospital admissions and observation stays, emergency department visits, and clinic utilization.
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