Wrong Pockets/ Healthy Alliance Analysis
•We were funded to study an innovation solution to the “Wrong Pockets” phenomena.
•This occurs when one organization won’t fund a program that is socially beneficial because the returns come to another organization.
Project Summary
Our partner in this grant proposal is Healthy Alliance, an independent practice association (IPA) focused on addressing social determinants of health. Healthy Alliance, founded in 2018, currently serves Medicaid and uninsured clients in 19 counties in New York, representing a mix of urban/rural and historically underserved populations. Healthy Alliance seeks to help those in need by connecting clients to necessary services using culturally sensitive approaches. Healthy Alliance curates and coordinates a mix of social services and health providers, facilitated by a referral and tracking platform, Healthy Together. This platform has a structured intake to identify a client’s risks and needs. It also tracks referrals and whether the person received the service, creating a “closed-loop system” that differentiates the network from “usual care.”
Our study is guided by a conceptual model that integrates social and health needs into a sustainable infrastructure using joint purpose, data, governance, and financing. We pair our conceptual model with a robust evaluation using a difference-in-differences study design where we will follow cases and matched controls before and after implementation of Healthy Alliance. Cases are defined as people who have been referred via the Healthy Together program in years 2019-2021. We will identify controls using propensity score matching from control counties. The primary outcome will be change in total medical costs from 2016/17 to 2021 using The New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS).
Conceptual Model for how Healthy Alliance works to fix the Wrong Pockets Problem
Funding
This project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Systems for Action program from 2021 to 2024.
