Massive health collaboration launched in North Philly

Pennsylvania officials announced Thursday a broad collaboration to improve health care in North Philadelphia and a swath of surrounding neighborhoods where at least half the residents receive Medicaid, costing more than $1 billion last year.

The North Philadelphia Health Enterprise Zone encompasses an area from around Spring Garden Street north to Olney and from Frankford in the east to Germantown in the west. It is home to five hospitals that struggle financially under a heavy load of Medicaid patients.

Dallas acknowledged the Health Enterprise Zone covers a larger area than most people think of as North Philadelphia. "The zip codes that are involved are the zip codes of the people who use the health-care resources in North Philadelphia," he said.

The multipronged effort to get at the seemingly intractable problems of poor health and poverty will address not just what happens in hospitals and doctors' offices, "but also engage the community and really address those social determinants of health and unmet health-related social needs that hit health outcomes," said Susan Freeman, chief medical officer of Temple University Health System.

The initiative follows the closure in March of St. Joseph's Hospital, part of the financially ailing North Philadelphia Health System, which received special state aid averaging $11.3 million annually over the last nine years.

Among the key initiatives of the Health Enterprise Zone is an effort to identify the top 100 adult and child "superutilizers" -- people who have complex needs and make frequent emergency-room visits, Dallas said. These are people in the 1 percent of the U.S. Medicaid population who account for 25 percent of total expenditures, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

A study found 500 patients who visited one of the three North Broad Street emergency departments at least 10 times a year and 100 patients who visited at least 20 times a year, at a huge financial cost to the heath-care system and social cost to those individuals, Freedman said.

"We need to make sure that if you're treated at Einstein, if you're treated at Temple, if you're treated at Hahnemann, we know what's happening to that patient," Freedman said.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education is providing $1.5 million in grants to support Philadelphia's community schools initiative.

The Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia is participating in a bid to increase employment opportunities in North Philadelphia.

Dallas, the human services secretary, also hopes to attract philanthropic support for projects that reach further into neighborhoods than large health systems can manage.

Much of the work in the collaboration will be done through stakeholder committees with members from government, educational institutions, health-care providers, community groups, and others, who can sign up on the agency's website, Dallas said.

Joanne Grossi, the Philadelphia-based regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Region III, said she was unaware of similar efforts elsewhere.

"I'm really applauding the city of Philadelphia and the state for what they are doing here," Grossi said. "I think it's really innovative and it's really important."