By Heather Stringer, Photo: José Luis Villegas, California Health Care Foundation, August 24, 2022
Valerie Andrews, director of a community-based organization (CBO) in South Sacramento, was focusing on the fentanyl drug problem among Black residents in her area when a different issue began demanding her attention: hospitalization due to asthma. It was 2019, and she was talking to yet another distraught mother who had taken her child to the emergency room because of a severe asthma attack. This mother had contacted her landlord about mold in the house that she suspected of exacerbating her six-year-old son’s illness, but the landlord was unwilling to do anything about it. The mom was forced to move her family.
Andrews, leader of the JUDAHH (Just Us Delivering a Helping Hand) project, applied for a grant that would enable her to offer asthma remediation and education to her community. She was awarded a three-year grant by The Center at Sierra Health Foundation in 2020, but funding was soon running out. Then she heard about a new Medi-Cal initiative called CalAIM (California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal) that could potentially cover the cost of asthma services. The initiative, led by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), is a multiyear plan to integrate social services into the benefits provided by Medi-Cal, the health insurance program that covers 14.6 million Californians. CBOs such as JUDAHH have the opportunity to contract with managed care plans and receive reimbursement for a whole range of social services, including housing deposits, medically tailored meals, asthma home remediation, and caregiver respite services.
“A primary goal with CalAIM is to use resources more effectively to address a broad array of nonclinical issues that clearly drive health outcomes,” said Jeremy Cantor, a senior consultant for JSI, an organization of health policy and public health specialists that supports the local rollout of CalAIM. “This is a dramatic vision to transform services and practices of eligible providers to better meet the needs of the most acute, vulnerable populations, and now it’s time to implement that vision.”
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