Promoting Community Health Worker Leadership in Policy Development: Results from a Louisiana Workforce Study
Community health workers (CHWs) are effective in improving public health, and many states are developing policy to support the workforce. In 2019, the Louisiana legislature created the CHW Workforce Study Committee (Committee) of at least half CHWs to study the workforce and provide the state with policy recommendations. The Committee followed national best practices in […]
Recommendations to the Health Policy Commission
Our recommendations center on organizing principles and activities that will support the roles that CHWs play, particularly for underserved and vulnerable populations who face challenges in managing their health and for accessing care. We also recommend, under the relevant criterion, that ACOs demonstrate how they are employing CHWs to meet stated goals. A priority recommendation […]
A Balanced Portfolio Model For Improving Health: Concept And Vermont’s Experience
A successful strategy for improving population health requires acting in several sectors by implementing a portfolio of interventions. The mix of interventions should be both tailored to meet the community’s needs and balanced in several dimensions – for example, time frame, level of risk, and target population. One obstacle is finding sustainable financing for both […]
Community-Clinical Linkages With Community Health Workers in the United States: A Scoping Review
Despite the proliferation of community–clinical linkage (CCL) interventions with community health workers (CHWs), little is known about the components of these programs or how linkages are realized. In this scoping review, we synthesize evidence concerning the role of CHWs in creating and sustaining CCLs aimed at improv- ing individual health outcomes. Our inclusion criteria included […]
Addressing Health Disparities in the Rural United States: Advocacy as Caregiving among Community Health Workers and Promotores de Salud
Rural populations in the United States are faced with a variety of health disparities that complicate access to care. Community health workers (CHWs) and their Spanish-speaking counterparts, promotores de salud, are well-equipped to address rural health access issues, provide education, and ultimately assuage these disparities. In this article, we compare community health workers in the […]
Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) position statement: SBM supports increased efforts to integrate community health workers into the patient-centered medical home
Integrating community health workers (CHWs) into health care systems has been associated with enhanced patient experience, improved population health, and reduced costs and unnecessary utilization of resources. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), care provided by CHWs is eligible for reimbursement. However, optimal integration of CHWs into health care requires purposeful implementation. This health policy […]
California Legislature Assembly Bill No. 316
Existing law requires the State Department of Health Services to review and survey the extent to which agricultural workers and their families utilize those public health programs for which they are eligible, including, but not limited to, the Medi-Cal program and the Healthy Families Program. This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to […]
Health Care Providers Are Hiring the Wrong People
In healthcare hiring there have long been strong prejudices about race, class and educational attainment. Many of our conventions come from an era when healthcare was delivered primarily by doctors and nurses with elite training whose success depended mostly on content expertise. This paradigm is outdated; we now know that social, behavioral and relational factors are […]
Roles and Functions of Community Health Workers in Primary Care
Community health workers have potential to enhance primary care access and quality, but remain underutilized. To provide guidance on their integration, we characterized roles and functions of community health workers in primary care through a literature review and synthesis. Analysis of 30 studies identified 12 functions (ie, care coordination, health coaching, social support, health assess- […]
Establishing voluntary certification of community health workers in Arizona: a policy case study of building a unified workforce
In this article, we describe the process of unifying the two major CHW workforces in Arizona, promotoras de salud in US-Mexico border communities and community health representatives (CHRs) serving American Indian communities. Differences in the origins, financing, and even language of the population-served contributed to historically divergent interests between CHRs and promotoras. In order to […]
