CHW Research Pinpoints U.S. Health Disparity; Highest Need Communities Twice as Likely to Experience Preventable Hospitalizations.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) has taken an innovative step toward improving the health of disadvantaged communities throughout the United States with today's release of its Community Need Index (CNI), which pinpoints health disparity for every zip code in the nation.

CHW developed the national index in partnership with Solucient, the nation's leading source of information products for the healthcare industry, to help health care organizations, non-profits, and policy makers identify and address barriers to health care access in their communities.

The CNI aggregates five socioeconomic indicators long known to contribute to health disparity and applies them to every zip code in the United States. Residents of communities with the highest CNI scores were shown to be twice as likely to experience preventable hospitalization for manageable conditions -- such as ear infections, pneumonia or congestive heart failure -- as communities with the lowest CNI scores.

"As one of the largest safety net health care providers in the nation, we have a responsibility to improve the health and well being of the communities we serve," said Lloyd H. Dean, president/chief executive officer of CHW. "This tool enables us to target our preventive health care services where they are most likely to improve people's health."

The CNI provides compelling evidence for addressing socioeconomic barriers when considering health policy and local health planning. The tool clearly highlights health care disparities between geographic regions and illustrates the acute needs of several notable geographies, including inner city and rural areas. Further, it should enable health care providers, policy makers and others to allocate resources where they are most needed using a standardized, quantitative tool.

The CNI provides CHW with an important means to strategically allocate resources where it will be most effective in maintaining a healthy community. CHW recently made grant awards totaling more than $2.3 million to non-profit organizations working to address the barriers to health access identified in the CNI.

"This is an exciting tool with wide ranging benefit for public health agencies and health care organizations," said M. Lynn Yonekura, M.D., the director of community benefit for CHW's California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles. "The CNI gives great visibility to our most vulnerable communities, and it will help us target our resources where they will do the most good," she added.

Continued strategic use of the CNI to address the causes of health disparity may result in lowering health costs since high need community members are more likely to be uninsured and therefore more likely to delay treatment for preventable conditions until costly hospitalization is required.

The CNI integrates five factors long known to contribute to health need. Specifically, CHW compiled data related to income, culture/language, education, housing status, and insurance coverage for every zip code in the United States. Each zip code is then given a score from 1.0 (low need) to 5.0 (high need).

"Accurate measurement of community need is challenging but crucial for ensuring that patients have appropriate access to quality health care," said Rich Roth, director of strategy and business development for CHW and the principle investigator for the CNI. "We developed this tool to help us demonstrate and quantify the link between community need, access to care, and hospitalization."

Total admissions per 1000 population for communities in the 23 states that publicly report discharge data showed that hospitalization rates for the most highly needy communities (CNI=5.0) were 60% higher than communities with the lowest need (CNI=1.0).

When admission rates for conditions that could have been treated an in outpatient setting (such as, ear infections, pneumonia, or congestive heart failure) were compared to CNI scores, the correlation was even stronger, with the most highly needy communities experiencing admission rates that were almost twice as high (97%) as rates for the lowest need communities.

"Accurate assessment of community need is the first step in addressing disparities in health care access," said Kaveh Safavi, M.D., J.D., Solucient's chief medical officer. "Objective measurement of at-risk communities should lead to better allocation of local health care resources and frame successful health policy discussions at the state and national level."

Both CHW and Solucient have agreed to share their methodology with other health systems and community benefit organizations in an effort to improve community needs analysis nationally. The data used for the CNI was combined from Census 2000 data, as well as Solucient and Claritas proprietary information. CHW will update the data in the CNI yearly and use the results to guide and measure its work with community partners and other non-profits to better meet community health needs.

The full CNI report is available online at www.chwHEALTH.org. Go to "About Us" and click on "Press Center."

About Catholic Healthcare West

Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), headquartered in San Francisco, CA, is a system of 40 hospitals and medical centers in California, Arizona and Nevada. Founded in 1986, it is one of the nation's largest not-for-profit health care systems and the largest Catholic health care system based in the Western United States. CHW is committed to delivering compassionate, high-quality, affordable health care services with special attention to the poor and underserved. The CHW network of more than 7,000 physicians and approximately 40,000 employees provide quality health care services during more than four million patient visits annually. In 2004, CHW provided $567 million in charity care and unsponsored community benefit. For more information, please visit our website at www.CHWhealth.org.

About Solucient, LLC 

Solucient(R) is an information products company serving the healthcare industry. It is the market leader in providing tools and vital insights that healthcare managers use to improve the performance of their organizations. By integrating, standardizing and enhancing healthcare information, Solucient provides comparative measurements of cost, quality and market performance. Solucient's expertise and proven solutions enable providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies to drive business growth, manage costs and deliver high quality care. For more information, visit www.solucient.com.