Lauran Hardin, Senior Advisor at NHHA, featured on See You Now podcast
For over 20 years, Lauran Hardin has been working with underserved populations. She started off her career in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a nurse. This is where she saw first-hand how important it is to work with people from all over the community to meet the complicated needs of those in tough situations. Lauran furthered her work in healthcare systems on a National level to build models for complex populations. This allowed her to use her knowledge and experience to help organizations design solutions that would better serve their patients.
Joining the NHHA team this past March, the work she is doing now is very similar to previous work she has done, “but even more”. To Lauran, all work is done with a simple philosophy in mind: collaboration, sharing resources, integrating healthcare, and using creative thinking can help solve equity issues and increase the quality of life of vulnerable populations. She has seen it work in creating solutions to problems – from big cities to the most rural and under-resourced communities.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”
At NHHA, Lauran continues to partner with sites and work on projects around improving healthcare and ending homelessness. Recently, she was featured in the See You Now podcast episode “Health Starts with Housing”, where she broke down the Complex Care Center model, methodology, and why integration of systems is important.
The U.S. has one of the highest rates of healthcare spending in the world. Vulnerable populations are only 5% of the population, but account for almost 50% of all healthcare spending. To alleviate this impact, it is important to understand people's stories and foster collaboration across sectors. This is where the Complex Care Model and other models NHHA builds come into play.
The Complex Care Model is built collaboratively with health systems, policymakers, community partners and individuals to create a model that meets the needs of vulnerable populations. The goal is to decrease the complexity of the case and take it down to a solvable size so that individuals receive holistic care and aren’t falling through the cracks of the healthcare system. For example, take a 35 year old with Schizophrenia. He has had bouts of psychosis that have led him to getting arrested. This criminal record renders him unable to get a job, and as a result, he is homeless. The key to understanding how to create a better life for him is to see him as someone with a story whose chapters are all interconnected.
In the podcast, Lauran recounts having to navigate her mothers multiple illnesses and how different facilities had different solutions and protocols. We are all affected by the need for complex care, and this begs the question: how can healthcare advisors link, integrate, and create systems that provide health and healing? The simplest thing those in the healthcare industry can do is listen to their patients' stories. Healthcare providers are trained to ask and listen to their patients medical needs, but don't always ask about other needs that affect their health, like housing, transportation, and access to medicine.
Linking systems in a complex care model may sound expensive, but we cannot afford NOT to use it as a solution. With healthcare accounting for 18% of the American GDP, it is too much to spend on a crisis we are not putting money towards solving. If we release 50% of costs in the healthcare industry, those are a lot of resources we could use elsewhere. As seen in one example, after they adopted a complex care model, their ROI was 23%, and unnecessary hospital visits were cut 43%.
Data is a powerful tool, and it can be used to prevent problems before they become big. Data shows us new and innovative patterns that are difficult to observe naturally. There are also some really exciting ways of using AI and NLP (natural language processing) to look for patterns in data that aren't easily accessible. This helps spot instances before they become big problems—making it easier to address quickly and efficiently before they snowball. For example, Lauran can identify vulnerable individuals and be proactive in getting them help before they develop more complex needs.
The community at large looks at shared data across systems and looks at who's vulnerable in their community—who might need help or resources in order to avoid homelessness or the risk of homelessness—and then acts on that information. They take the lessons they learned from those individuals and translate them into changes and other efforts aimed at preventing homelessness from occurring in the first place. One example of this that Lauran is particularly excited about is happening in Louisville, Kentucky. There, the African American faith leaders want to provide their vulnerable community members with a center of resources including affordable housing and healthcare access.
This model provides a glimpse of the future for health, housing and many other sectors. We can see the complex care model creating new ways to meet the needs of vulnerable seniors and those living with disabilities, while also making the current system more efficient and responsive to the needs of their communities.
For more information
Taking care of Charlie helped one California town nearly halve hospital use
Some of Austin’s homeless die from treatable conditions. One group works to heal the disparity.
4 Innovative Ways Nurses Shifted Healthcare to the Communities Who Needed It Most Amid the Pandemic
How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own
