The stories of how Alex Porter and Rico Bodin became addicted to opioids might differ. For Alex, prescription drugs were easy for the then-16-year-old girl to steal from her mom’s medicine cabinet. Rico abused drugs to help escape from complex family problems. But what they now share is a recovery that includes rescuing others from the profound grip of addiction. Both Rico and Alex are peer recovery specialists at Gateway Community Services (GCS), an addiction treatment center in Jacksonville, Florida. This year, The...
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How does the health care industry begin to address key factors like housing, economic status, health literacy, and even air quality that prevent some of us from being our healthiest selves? GuideWell’s Prakash Patel, M.D., knows that one’s health is not determined in the four walls of the doctor’s office – it happens in the home. As Chief Operating Officer for GuideWell and President of GuideWell Health, Prakash oversees an innovative new care delivery system designed to directly impact those factors, known collectively as social determinants of health, with clinicians...
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By Kate WarnockThe “Triple Aim” in health care delivery is a mantra of sorts these days, but with good reason: improving health outcomes, advancing population health and driving down the cost of care is a far superior – and more sustainable – approach over traditional care delivery. GuideWell’s President, René Lerer, M.D., provided his perspective on the shift toward value-based care in light of the Triple Aim in his keynote address to ...
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By Kate WarnockSearch for “patient experience” and its Twitter offshoot (#ptexp) and you’ll find reams of conversations, white papers, and entire entities designed to tackle what we all know needs to be addressed: how to improve people’s health care experience. Perhaps no other population deserves to have their care experience scrutinized more closely than the frail elderly suffering multiple, chronic conditions.Recognizing our most vulnerable seniors deserve continuous, high quality care at an affordable cost, GuideWell has ...
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By Prakash Patel, M.D.In terms of population size, Hispanics have always attracted payers’ attention – certainly more so in this exchange market as consumers wield ever-growing insurance buying-power. Yet many established health plans don’t appeal to prospective Hispanic members because they limit their offers to products, networks and service experiences designed for a homogeneous market. Attempting to retrofit those things assumes that the Hispanic consumers’ needs, wants and even approach to health care mirror the traditional market. Here lies the source of the...
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There are times when the smartest approach to a problem is to draw against the tested experience of others. In many ways, champion practitioners of population health can – and should – guide how value-based care is defined and delivered. We interviewed three such champions for our GuideWell Insights podcast on this topic:Roderick King, M.D., a pediatrician and CEO of Florida Institute for Health Innovation;James Corbett, M.Div, J.D., Senior Vice President of Community Health Improvement and Values Integration at Centura Health, and Fellow, Safra Center For Ethics, Harvard...
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