The recent 9th Annual Camden Coalition Conference, hosted in Pittsburgh, focused this year on building and sustaining equitable care ecosystems. Camden Coalition, a multidisciplinary nonprofit working to improve care for people with complex health and social needs, is well-known nationwide for its seminal study discussing the organization’s “wrap around” model of care for high-cost patients in New Jersey, a model many organizations nationwide have elected to adopt.
In a packed three days, several themes emerged from the conference that reflect and inform the way Waymark pursues its mission of providing effective, equitable access to community-based care for people enrolled in Medicaid.
Importance of community
Sessions throughout the conference emphasized the need to build communities centered around patients with lived experience and the trusted organizations serving these patients. As Waymark continues to deepen our presence in the communities we serve, these sessions offered several important reminders:
- Referrals to trusted organizations are great, but referrals to trusted people within trusted organizations are even better. Continuing to build mutually beneficial relationships with people and organizations that our patients already trust helps maximize the impact of our work and the benefit for our patients.
- Patient and community advisory councils/boards are a powerful tool for ensuring we meet the true needs of those we serve. Still, far too often, these are performative rather than impactful. As we expand into new markets, we must continue to listen to patients and community members on how to best deliver care in their communities. These individuals serve as our “waymarks,” or guideposts, and this is the premise upon which Waymark was founded.
Centering stories of care team members
The Camden Coalition used the conference to launch a new report on the core competencies for complex care team leaders and also underscored the experience of care team members throughout many conference sessions. Keynote speaker Father Paul Abernathy of the Neighborhood Resilience Project spoke about shifting the framing of our collective work from complex care to complex healing and from trauma-informed to resilience-promoting, and speakers throughout the sessions reminded us that this shift starts with ensuring that our frontline teams have support to focus on their storytelling, reflection, healing, and resilience.
Other sessions focused on a different aspect of storytelling–the power of comprehensive care plans to reflect whole-person care needs as well as patient strengths and assets. Such care plans can help patients to tell their stories–to themselves, their families, and their caregivers and providers. This will continue to be an area that Waymark prioritizes.
The conference also re-emphasized the unique strengths that will continue to set Waymark apart – in particular, the flexibility Waymark has to focus on the things most important to our patients rather than the things we can bill for. While it is undoubtedly a positive development that more and more states can use Medicaid funding to pay for health-related social needs, the strings attached to this can be daunting; the Camden Coalition Conference reinforced that it’s worth tangling ourselves up in these strings a bit to drive meaningful change for patients. It was a pleasure to spend several days immersed in discussion with individuals as passionately committed to improving the health of complex patients as everyone who works for Waymark is.
