The Better Care Playbook's 2023 Summer Reading List

Summer is a great time to relax, recharge, and catch up on the latest trends and best practices in complex care. The Better Care Playbook’s summer reading list offers a selection of blog posts and evidence summaries that showcase innovative strategies for improving care for people with complex needs. Don’t miss these valuable insights!

Blog Posts

• Using Primary Care-Based Community Health Workers to Support Individuals with a History of Incarceration: Transitions Clinic Network – Profiles a national network of primary care clinics that integrates community health workers with a history of incarceration into primary care settings.
• Raising the Bar for Addiction Care: A Conversation with a Leading Addiction Medicine Specialist – Sarah Wakeman, MD, Medical Director for Substance Use Disorder at Mass General Brigham, discusses how to implement quality addiction care in general health care settings.
• The Other 99: Using Harm Reduction Strategies to Drive Connections and Save Lives – Outlines the life-saving benefits of harm reduction and shares practical steps to help health care organizations adopt this approach to drive improved outcomes among people with substance use disorder.
• Community Health Workers Offer Critical Supports for Patients with Complex Health and Social Needs: An Evidence Review – Aditi Vasan, MD, MSHP, health services researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, delves into recent evidence on how community health workers can be helpful to patients with complex health and social needs.
• Rhode Island Community Health Teams: Coordinating with Primary Care to Address Social and Behavioral Health Needs – Describes how provider organizations employ multidisciplinary teams, including community health workers and behavioral health clinicians, to collaborate with primary care practices in providing whole-person care.
• Involving People with Lived Experience in Complex Care Research – Hemal Kanzaria, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and LaKeesha Dumas, social justice, community, and behavioral health advocate, discuss how involving people with lived experience in research can help strengthen the complex care evidence base.

Evidence Summaries & Collections

• Community Health Worker Programs for People with Complex Needs – Curates recent evidence behind community health worker programs for a range of populations with complex health and social needs, as well as practical strategies to support effective implementation of these programs.
• Implementation of Peer Support in Mental Health Services: A Systematic Review of the Literature – Shares best practices for implementing peer support interventions and advancing recovery-oriented care within mental health organizations.
• Collaborating Toward Equity in Pennsylvania: The Age-Friendly Care, PA Project – Highlights how the use of the Age-Friendly Health Systems approach within a federally qualified health center in Pennsylvania improved process outcomes and access to care for rural older adults.
• Building Bi-Directional Referral and Communication Pathways Across the Community-Clinic Divide Experiences from a Systems-Informed Innovation Project in Los Angeles – Finds that well-designed bi-directional communication and referral systems may optimize the flow of patients from health care providers to community-based organizations to address social needs.
• The Incidence and Disparities in Use of Stigmatizing Language in Clinical Notes for Patients With Substance Use Disorder – This randomized controlled trial of a person-centered housing intervention for older adults shows improved health outcomes for formerly homeless adults living in permanent supportive housing.
• A Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Improve Adherence to ACEIs/ARBs Among Nonadherent Older Adults with Comorbid Hypertension and Diabetes – A phone-based motivational interviewing intervention delivered by trained pharmacy students significantly improved medication adherence among an older adult population with chronic disease.

Top Playbook Webinar

• Addressing the Complex Needs of Older Adults through Strong Community-Based Organization and Health Plan Partnerships – Featured perspectives from program leaders and researchers on the value case for partnerships between health plan entities and community-based organizations.