SDOH Awareness, Care Coordination Key to Payer Leader Development

Payers that are looking to develop strong healthcare leaders should focus on strengthening learners' care coordination and social determinants of health awareness.

Payers and healthcare organizations face a couple of key challenges in healthcare leadership development.

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In a recent episode of Healthcare Strategies, LeChauncy Woodard, MD, director of Humana Integrated Health System Sciences Institute and professor at the University of Houston, stressed that healthcare training face challenges in addressing access to care, home healthcare, telehealth, social determinants of health, and payment models.

These are the types of issues that Woodard tackles in her work at the Humana Integrated Health System Sciences Institute (Humana Institute).

The Humana Institute is a partnership between major payer Humana, Inc., and the University of Houston. Students from the university’s colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, optometry, social work, and other specialties can receive training in this program.

“The Institute is an opportunity to bring those colleges together to think early on about how we train our learners and prepare them to go out and be transformational leaders as they work in more value-based care environments and how we help to prepare them to work together to help better meet the needs of the patients that we serve,” Woodard explained.

Woodard emphasized the importance of training leaders in care coordination and social determinants of health awareness. She found that combining industry and academic perspectives was useful in this effort.

“In industry and academics, we do many things similarly, but we do a lot of things differently,” said Woodard.

“As we've started this partnership, that's been an important step that we've taken: understanding the cultures of each of our institutions, understanding the synergy, understanding our alignment, and then identifying projects that really fit the needs of both organizations while always keeping our learners, our community, and the needs of our patients at the forefront.”

As the payer industry and academia prepare healthcare leaders for the future, Woodard noted that bringing together individuals from across the different healthcare professions is crucial to expanding learners’ perspectives. This approach trains future stakeholders to seek alignment, which is a critical step to advancing value-based care according to an Insights report.

Additionally, she emphasized that interaction with the local community supports healthcare leaders’ development.

“It helps our learners to feel more empowered to actually work with community members, to hear their needs and to shape the work that they're doing, to make sure that it's always to the benefit of our patients and their families and the community,” Woodard shared.