Chronic Care Plus is designed for ‘Joe,’ a prototypical vulnerable client and frequent hospital user who for some reason has not connected to either his community or healthcare system.
Back in 2008 when we first started, we began to realize that housing was healthcare. With many of the patients we were seeing, although we experienced great success, we ended up discharging them many times back into a shelter or into an assisted living or sober living situation. And although these options were better than being in the hospital or being discharged to the street, we knew we could improve on this.
So, in 2013, we implemented the Chronic Care Plus (CCP) program. Basically, CCP was recuperative care on steroids. It was recuperative care with more tightly wrapped social services and a longer length of stay. At that time, we began a pilot program in conjunction with UniHealth and St. Joseph’s Hospital in which we took the 28 most frequent users and kept them in housing for two years. We also brought these individuals through recuperative care, and wrapped them tightly with social services.
These efforts would eventually lead us to create our ‘Street2Home’ program, which we’re working on now. It implements more bridge housing and permanent supportive housing that is supplied not only by us but by collaboratives in the community. We are able to link to these collaboratives to take our individual, our ‘Joe,’ from a street to eventual permanent housing.
Source: Homelessness and Healthcare: Creating a Safety Net for Super Utilizers with Medical Bridge Housing
Homelessness and Healthcare: Creating a Safety Net for Super Utilizers with Medical Bridge Housing spotlights a California partnership that provides medical ‘bridge’ housing to homeless patients following hospitalization. This recuperative care initiative reduced avoidable hospital readmissions and ER visits and significantly lowered costs for the collaborating organizations.
