Key Takeaways
- Addressing social drivers of health is a win-win. These services help patients and families avoid hospitalization and keep health care costs down.
- Sustaining the caregiver is important. Providers can fill in for the caregiver on a short-term basis, providing a much-needed respite.
CalAIM (California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal) enables managed care plans to offer 14 Community Supports — services not traditionally covered by Medi-Cal that address health-related social needs. Some of these services, like housing navigation and medically tailored meals, have been readily adopted by participating health plans since the launch of Community Supports in 2022, while others have gotten off to a slower start. This fact sheet profiles two of these services with relatively low adoption: personal care and homemaker services, and respite services.
Personal care and homemaker services are for people needing help with activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, toileting, walking, or feeding. This Community Support can also be used to help with activities like meal preparation, grocery shopping, and money management. Respite services include the same services and are provided when a regular caregiver is absent or in need of relief.
In the fact sheet, learn about two organizations in Kern County partnering to offer these two Community Supports — Kern Family Health Care, a local managed care plan, and SD Healthcare Consulting, a community-based organization that offers in-home services for Medi-Cal enrollees.
Key takeaways for others implementing these Community Supports:
- Addressing social drivers of health is a win-win. “Being nurses, we understand and acknowledge the importance of the social determinants of health,” said Sangeeta Datta, co-owner of SD Healthcare. “Now these services will be helping out [patients and families] and then keeping health care costs down, and at the same time empowering our members in the community so our hospitals are not overwhelmed with some simple problems.”
- Sustaining the caregiver is important. “We can go fill in, and the caregivers can go and take care of their own health . . . because they’re feeling burned out or they’re overwhelmed,” explained Datta. “[The caregiver can] then come back with the fresh mindset to say, `Okay, I got some relief, and now I can take care of my loved one.’”
This fact sheet is drawn from a webinar that is part of a Center for Health Care Strategies series created to help inform uptake of Community Supports by spotlighting early adopters of services that have not been widely adopted. The webinars highlight provider-plan relationships with the aim of amplifying promising practices for increasing Community Supports uptake across all 14 services.
Authors & Contributors
J. Duncan Moore Jr.
J. Duncan Moore Jr. is a freelance writer based in Kansas City, Missouri, who has been writing about health care for more than 25 years. He is a founder of the Association of Health Care Journalists.
