2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 241
dedicated phone number to call for medical advice. The coalition documented
the improvements for the first 36 participants, with a 40 percent
reduction in hospital visits. By late 2010, Dr. Brenner’s team had provided
care for more than 300 people (Gawande 2011).
The coalition has hired in-house analysts to update and manage the
data and has routinized much of its analysis work since the first analysis
in 2006. The Health Information Exchange, launched in 2010 with
the original three health systems, allows hospital data to be viewed by
over 100 healthcare providers in Camden. The exchange’s real-time data
feeds from health care facilities inform clinicians’ treatment decisions.
The exchange also supports the coalition’s continuing work to identify the
patients who could most benefit from their intervention program. Each
morning, the coalition staff generates a list identifying Camden residents
who were admitted to a city hospital the previous day and have histories
of hospitalizations for chronic conditions. 23
Through the coalition’s journey over the past decade, the members are
able to share the lessons they have learned about strategic coordination,
the importance of communication, and the need for sustainability. They
identified the motivations that brought players to the table: a mutual
dissatisfaction with costs and poor outcomes from status quo practices
in the health care system.
Two of the lessons in particular echo the experiences of NNIP and
the previous case studies (Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers
2014):
• No single organization or health system has enough resources to
solve a citywide problem. Solutions require collaboration among
all stakeholders to provide adequate support for implementation.
• Initiatives need to be data-driven in order to direct the most effective
strategies and to understand where to dedicate resources.
In 2013, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Dr. Brenner’s innovative
ideas by awarding him their Genius grant. The coalition is moving
in several directions to advance their practice and the field as a
whole. After building trust as responsible users of the hospital claims
data, they have begun to expand the data warehouse by incorporating
additional sources, including lab results, neighborhood-collected
BMI data, and birth records, and by expanding coverage to suburban
hospitals. 24