San Francisco Health Plan Care Support Intervention: A Randomized Trial

Purpose: The purpose of the CareSupport intervention is to coordinate often-fragmented care for SFHP members with heavy use of acute health care services, reducing cost of care for the San Francisco safety net (the San Francisco Department of Health and San Francisco General Hospital) while increasing use of sustaining services including primary care.

The Program: The San Francisco Health Plan (SFHP) CareSupport program identifies high-utilizing SFHP members with high risk for mortality and morbidity due to factors that complicate underlying illness and care seeking patterns. These factors include housing instability, behavioral health issues, and complex medical illness. This population's medical, behavioral and social needs are not met by the existing delivery system, and while many issues they face may not be traditionally perceived as health care, they do impact this vulnerable population's health and care seeking patterns greatly.

CareSupport Community Coordinators each carry a caseload of 25-35 eligible members identified based on health services use in the prior 12 months. Each team of 5 Coordinators is supervised by a skilled master's level Social Worker. Community Coordinators outreach to eligible patients and conduct detailed assessments in order to develop a Care Plan that is then shared with other providers within and outside of SFHP. Community Coordinators provide patient-centered, community-based advocacy and navigation across systems of care, to improve coordination and unify health and treatment goals. The CareSupport program incorporates a focus on prevention and early intervention within a continuum of quality health care that includes disease management, advocacy, appointment reminders and accompaniment, home visits, and regular communication with primary care and other providers. Community Coordinators are accountable for coordinating and following through on all aspects of a member's needs, and their duties are as variable as reminder calls, accompaniment to medical appointments, assistance with housing placement, and help obtaining food and other services. Twice weekly team meetings involve complex case reviews and program troubleshooting as well as mini trainings led by social work supervisors. The staff is trained in trauma-informed care, motivational interviewing, harm reduction, and other areas of relevance to the intervention target population.

The investigators' composed of 3 groups of SFHP members, all of whom are heavy users of health care services: 1) members with a minimum of 2 hospitalizations in the year before enrollment 2) members with 5 ED visits and 1 hospitalization in the year before enrollment, and 3) members with 6 or more ED visits in the year before enrollment in the investigators' program.

The current CareSupport staff does not have the capacity to serve all SFHP members who are eligible for CareSupport. The investigators propose to ethically allocate limited resources and evaluate the impact of CareSupport using a randomly selected comparison group of non-enrolled, CareSupport eligible SFHP members.