Cost Analysis of KC CARE Community Health Worker Program

Community health worker programs take many forms and have been shown to be effective in improving health in several contexts. The extent to which they reduce unnecessary care is not firmly established. This report uses cost information for a hub-and-spoke community health worker program run by KC Care (Kansas City, MO) to estimate the number of ED visits and hospitalizations that would need to be avoided for the program to recoup costs on a program level. This report does not take other outcomes of the program from the clients’ or workers’ perspectives into account so it is likely an upper bound on the number of avoided visits.