Health Equity
The Convergence team prides itself on its proven track record of collaborating with hospitals and providers to ensure that everyone has a fair and just chance to achieve their best health.
Our Work
Many social needs indices exist, but few fully reflect the needs and realities of rural communities. Convergence partnered with the Montana Health Research and Education Foundation to develop the Montana Index for Healthy Communities (MT IHC) to address this challenge.
The MT IHC combines hospital discharge data and geographic data sources, such as the American Community Survey, to describe socioeconomic and health care needs across Montana. The index includes scores for hospitals and each zip code in the state to describe the level of need across 14 domains, ranging from housing and transportation to internet connectivity and health care provider supply. With insights from the index, hospitals and their partners can imagine new ways to collaborate and support the communities with the greatest need.
Convergence supported pilot sites to test how hospitals might use the MT IHC data to guide efforts to address social drivers of health. Learn more about the Montana IHC and how hospitals are using this rich data source at www.MontanaIHC.com. Link coming soon.
Building a Health and Social Needs Index – The Montana Index for Healthy Communities
Learning Collaboratives to Guide SDOH Screening Efforts
Hospitals and many other providers are gearing up to report new health equity measures to CMS, including the social drivers of health screening metrics. Convergence is helping providers across the country understand these requirements, set up screening processes, and take action to meet patients’ SDOH needs.
Our learning collaboratives combine webinars, office hours, and action items between sessions. The number, type, and pacing of sessions are customized to meet your needs. Topics include:
Health Equity: The Big Picture – an exploration of how SDOH screening fits into efforts to advance health equity.
Building Trust to Strengthen SDOH Screening – a deep dive into the who, why, when, where, and how of interviewing for SDOH with an emphasis on building trust.
Using Data to Drive Improvement – considerations for analyzing SDOH screening data, using Z-codes, and identifying disparities in your quality or outcome data.
Getting to Action – ideas for how to meet individual patient and community needs.
Presentations – Building Will, Generating Ideas, and Supporting Implementation
Our experts will work with you to design presentations or workshops that support your team in implementing their social drivers of health and health equity strategies. Presentations can be in-person or virtual, single sessions, or a series.
Convergence has worked with state hospital associations and health systems across the country, including:
Lovelace Health System Quality Leadership Annual Planning Meeting
Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network Rural Health Fellowship
Florida Hospital Association “Quality Hot Topics”
Illinois Hospital Association Chief Medical Executive Forum
Alaska Hospital & Healthcare Association Quality Summit
Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association Health Equity Organizational Assessment Collaborative
What partners are saying
“You have nailed it, I love this presentation! It speaks to most everything I have heard from the hospitals.”
– State hospital association leader
“Having us write down what our organization is currently doing/our ideas about what we could be doing was helpful. Many of us are nursing no longer at the bedside and struggle with the same question that our beside nurses do - ‘Okay, now what? What are we doing about these concerns?’ This exercise was helpful in getting our thoughts flowing.”
– Hospital quality leader
“It was tremendously helpful to us. Thanks to you, we feel much better positioned on next steps with SDOH screening.”
– Health system quality leader
Tools
Mini-Courses
Coming soon!