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Regional councils to help promote health equity

HARRISBURG — The Wolf Administration announced yesterday that they will be launching Regional Accountable Health Councils to work on reducing disparities negatively impacting communities of color across the Commonwealth, a program going through Medicaid.

“We can’t pretend that these areas are the same as every other,” Department of Human Services Secretary, Teresa Miller. “Because of systemic racism and redlining policies…those communities were divested of everything, you can see it in every single metric.”

These different groups are going to be in five regions, Southeast, Northeast,

Northwest, Southwest and Lehigh/Capitol, spanning across the state and researching what communities in those regions are suffering from disparities such as lack of access to healthcare, affordable housing, socio-economic issues and more, and find ways to help reduce and eliminate the negative impacts.

Miller even shared some jarring data including: the life expectancy of newborns in a northern Philadelphia community is 63 years while just south of that community has a newborn expectancy of 87 years.

“This last year was kind of a wake up call,” Miller said. “(With the RAHC’s) hopefully we can see more investment by other entities and this data being changed. We do need to understand that this is going to take time, but we have to start somewhere.”

The goal is to have a network of entities, including hospitals and healthcare systems as well as community based organizations, that can be active in the prospective communities.

“The short term goal is to promote health equity,” Miller added.

Other goals include: indicating regional social determinant of health needs, purchasing initiatives to achieve better care at lower costs, advance the integration of physical and behavioral healthcare and “steering population health improvement processes”.

Each regional network is set to create a plan that will include strategies on how to address the community’s needs and help provide incentives to initiatives that can help in providing equity to these communities.

DHS is still very early on in this process, but hopes to have these plans on hand once completed and reviewed from each region.

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