Grant Partners

Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers will serve as a key resource to its membership as cost containment and payment reform continue to reshape the health care environment. The League will conduct a multi-tiered advocacy strategy on a statewide level, including analyzing and disseminating policy information, engaging its members on key issues, and collaborating with other organizations and coalitions that share community health and primary health care goals.

Caring Health Center will target refugees, immigrants, and other linguistic and cultural minority groups who face barriers to enrollment and health care navigation. The health center provides comprehensive primary medical care and dental services to residents in the medically underserved city of Springfield and its surrounding areas.

Holyoke Health Center will serve 300 patients at high-risk for preventable hospitalization, re-hospitalization, unnecessary emergency department visits, or adverse drug events due to diabetes. The project will begin with identifying patients with diabetes with an unnecessary emergency room visit and recent hospitalization at Holyoke Medical Center, or eight or more prescriptions for diabetes.  A partnership with the Massachusetts Medicaid program will identify high-cost patients and work to understand how to predict which are amenable to disease management programs, leading to more effective, lower-cost services.

County of Dukes County will provide culturally and linguistically competent enrollment assistance, referrals, and retention services for public insurance and safety net programs, with a focus on the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking communities.

The Massachusetts Association of Community Health Workers (MACHW) will strengthen the professional identity, foster leadership, and promote the integration of community health workers (CHWs) into the health care, public health, and human services workforce. MACHW will continue to organize and empower CHWs to participate in policy and advocacy, conduct direct advocacy to ensure that CHWs are integrated into guidelines for medical homes and accountable care organizations, and will participate in advocacy coalitions and campaigns focused on health care access and payment reform.