Spring has sprung and vaccines abound! At our March bi-monthly Louisville Health Advisory Board (LHAB) meeting, we heard from LHAB co-chair, Gabriell Gassaway, Chief of Staff, Louisville Metro Public Health and Wellness, about the local vaccine roll-out, and looked back at five years of the Louisville Health Advisory Board through a data lens.

Dr. Bryan Loy, co-chair of the LHAB, Medical Director – Clinical Strategy, Humana, kicked off the meeting with a greeting welcoming the group and expressing appreciation for the LHAB members and the resources they bring to the table. He mentioned that we have listened to the LHAB and are looking at how we can strengthen the committees and include more community members. Dr. Loy handed it over to Gabriell Gassaway, who introduced herself for those that were not at the last meeting and had not met her. Gabriell is Chief of Staff at Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and a doctoral student at University of Louisville. She is taking the lead in the LHAB as Dr. Moyer focuses on COVID-19 and vaccine roll-out in the city, and she has a specific interest in housing justice. We are grateful to have her as a leader in our effort to make Louisville healthy for all its residents.

As many of you know, five years ago, Humana convened a town hall to review the health data they had on Louisville residents and ask the community what they wanted to focus on. The Louisville Health Advisory Board was born out of that town hall, with focuses on health issues the community chose. Originally those included diabetes, behavioral health, community coordination of care and culture. Over the years, in an effort not to duplicate work, some of those have transitioned to other collectives or combined with other committees, and we’ve added a respiratory health committee. At this meeting, we wanted to take time to review where we were and where we are now as a community, and learn what Humana’s corporate priorities are as well.

Dior Cotten, Population Health Strategy Lead, Humana and LHAB lead, presented data for Louisville. This data is Humana data and heavily focused on Medicaid Advantage members. Dior first reviewed the original Bold Goal and the timeline of growth of the Health Advisory Boards nationally, reminding the group that we were Healthy Days as the measurement.

The next evolution of the Bold Goal is to improve health equity as Robert Wood Johnson Foundation defines as that every person has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible, which requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and powerlessness. Humana reset their Bold Goal to be: to improve the health of the people and the communities we serve by making it easier for everyone to achieve their best health.

When we started the LHAB, our total unhealthy days in Louisville was 12.66%, in 2020, our total unhealthy days is down to 10.66%. This is in part the work that the LHAB has done, as well as increased screenings for social determinants of health by Humana. Additional screenings provide information that is then used to refer people to resources to help.

The top 5 social determinants of health in Louisville are: financial strain, food insecurity, housing quality, transportation, and social support. Our 3rd barrier to health is awareness of community resources. United Community has helped with this, as it makes it easy to refer people to services that address basic needs.

Dr. Monica Unseld, founder of Until Justice Data Partners and co-chair of LHAB Respiratory Health committee, mentioned that although this is useful information, this data does not show the whole picture. Many communities of color do not feel comfortable going to doctors, or sharing their info, therefore, we need better ways to survey people and get to those that don’t go to the doctor or share their information. Dr. Loy appreciated this and noted that we are open to suggestions on how to collect that information, so the data is more inclusive of all communities.

Dior ended her presentation by sharing the top 10 local conditions based on prevalence and recognizing that Louisville received its first gold medal within CityHealth’s 2020 policy assessment with gold medals for: complete streets, food safety, high-quality accessible pre-K, smoke free indoor air and tobacco 21.

You can view the whole presentation here.

Gabriell Gassaway shared updates on the vaccine roll-out. The health department has distributed over 270,000 vaccines as of the meeting. The health department is distributing different vaccines to different population groups, focusing on the one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine on transient populations, people experiencing homelessness, those in shelters, and in encampments. Eligibility has opened up to more populations and has moved rapidly. We have also been seeing a decline in cases and deaths from COVID-19 as well. The main focus right now is mobile missions to take vaccines to people.

The legislative sessions closed and a lot happened! For the most up to date information on policy and the legislative session, we recommend subscribing to Kentucky Voices for Health.

Announcements

Tom Walton, co-chair of the LHAB’s Community Coordination of Care (CCC) committee and Executive in Residence, University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences, shared information about the LHAB Community Coordination of Care project Respite to Recovery. The committee has focused on housing as health and the Respite to Recovery is a state-wide project with the Housing and Homeless Coalition of Kentucky and LHAB. Based on data from the state, there are approximately 4,050 discharges of people that were experiencing homelessness. This represents about 13,609 hospital days, and 1,021 readmissions. The estimated payments to hospitals is $26 million to take care of these people. The team is now approaching hospitals to get data on exactly how much this is costing each individual healthcare system. We think this program represents $5.6 million in savings in the Louisville market.

The LHAB Behavioral Health committee has received a grant to train the general public on Question Persuade Refer suicide prevention and to train clinicians on special clinician suicide training. The committee is very focused on making sure to train people in different committees that can then train others in their community. They are looking for opportunities to train people of different backgrounds and ethnicities to ensure that there are trainers that are representative of the whole community. If you have an interest in getting trained, you can find links within this flyer to access the training being coordinated with NAMI Louisville as our project manager for this effort.

Our next meeting for the LHAB as a whole is Thursday, May 20. The focus will be on community projects.