Twin Cities Hot Spotters is a interdisciplinary student organization at the University of Minnesota that comprises of students from the Medical School, School of Public Health, Law School, School of Social Work, School of Nursing and College of Pharmacy. The focus of the group is improving care of high utilizing patients in the Twin Cities through multiple means including community needs assessments, working with individual patients and partnering with community organizations.
Current Projects:
Research - Over the last year UMN Hotspotters has undertaken two research projects. The Literature Review team grew out of our interest in becoming involved in policy and influencing healthcare policy at the organizational, local, and above levels. However, we realized to do this, we need to understand what overutilization looks like, what a productive definition of a frequent-utilizing patient is and how others have defined these in the past. This project is still in process and we are eager to read their conclusions.
Needs assessment - Our group shared results from their Needs Assessment of patients with high utilization from an adult inpatient unit in a tertiary health care center associated with an academic medical center in the metro Minneapolis/St. Paul and compared it to the Hennepin County Medical Center Coordinated Care Clinic. Despite these two medical centers being in close proximity, two distinctly different populations with different needs were found. One interesting observation was that the patients observed frequently had insurance coverage and connection to many healthcare resources. This project highlighted the importance of surveying the patients to identify unmet needs before designing an intervention.
Policy -The policy team is working to understand high utilization in the Twin Cities region and how our local healthcare systems currently respond to this phenomenon. They are conducting informational interviews with providers and payers of healthcare services within the Twin Cities. The interviews are in process, and we hope to identify trends and differences between the practices and definitions that are used to address high utilization rates. We see this as the beginning of the UMN Hot Spotters’ endeavors towards taking action in the policy field and advocating for practices that produce better patient outcomes and that reduce high rates of utilization.
Another policy team member is combining his interest in geographic information systems and high utilization to create maps of healthcare hotspots here in the Twin Cities. He is currently partnering with the University of Minnesota Community-University Health Care Clinic and has started to comb data.
Curriculum - Lastly our curriculum team has been busy collaborating with the academic health center to incorporate hotspotting into the curriculum. The fall semester of 2016 school marks the start of the pilot program. Four teams of interprofessional students will work with patients who experience high healthcare utilization at local health centers.
Research - Over the last year UMN Hotspotters has undertaken two research projects. The Literature Review team grew out of our interest in becoming involved in policy and influencing healthcare policy at the organizational, local, and above levels. However, we realized to do this, we need to understand what overutilization looks like, what a productive definition of a frequent-utilizing patient is and how others have defined these in the past. This project is still in process and we are eager to read their conclusions.
Needs assessment - Our group shared results from their Needs Assessment of patients with high utilization from an adult inpatient unit in a tertiary health care center associated with an academic medical center in the metro Minneapolis/St. Paul and compared it to the Hennepin County Medical Center Coordinated Care Clinic. Despite these two medical centers being in close proximity, two distinctly different populations with different needs were found. One interesting observation was that the patients observed frequently had insurance coverage and connection to many healthcare resources. This project highlighted the importance of surveying the patients to identify unmet needs before designing an intervention.
Policy -The policy team is working to understand high utilization in the Twin Cities region and how our local healthcare systems currently respond to this phenomenon. They are conducting informational interviews with providers and payers of healthcare services within the Twin Cities. The interviews are in process, and we hope to identify trends and differences between the practices and definitions that are used to address high utilization rates. We see this as the beginning of the UMN Hot Spotters’ endeavors towards taking action in the policy field and advocating for practices that produce better patient outcomes and that reduce high rates of utilization.
Another policy team member is combining his interest in geographic information systems and high utilization to create maps of healthcare hotspots here in the Twin Cities. He is currently partnering with the University of Minnesota Community-University Health Care Clinic and has started to comb data.
Curriculum - Lastly our curriculum team has been busy collaborating with the academic health center to incorporate hotspotting into the curriculum. The fall semester of 2016 school marks the start of the pilot program. Four teams of interprofessional students will work with patients who experience high healthcare utilization at local health centers.
It’s hard not to be impressed by their energy and drive to learn more about hotspotting, underserved medicine, health economics and policy, interdisciplinary medicine, and the social determinants of health. |
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