MONTEREY – The Monterey County Board of Supervisors has accredited a plan to combine the county’s well being care system, making it simpler for sufferers to obtain the specialised care they want.
The board unanimously voted Tuesday in favor of a plan by the county’s Well being Division and Administrative Workplace and Natividad Medical Middle to coordinate affected person care companies.
Monterey County Director of Well being Elsa Jimenez argued that the construction of the county’s present well being system locations the burden on sufferers to hunt out care by the “complicated and generally unorganized programs that we have created.
“At the moment our system is fragmented, companies are siloed,” she mentioned. “And when you concentrate on the demographics in our group, which tends to be an growing older inhabitants, a inhabitants that will solely converse Spanish or one other indigenous language that won’t essentially be capable to entry our programs, it actually places an enormous accountability on them .”
County and Natividad officers argued different giant, multi-county well being programs like Sutter Well being and Kaiser Permanente have already built-in their affected person care networks, and that doing so will result in improved affected person and employees satisfaction.
Along with approving the plan, the board accredited the creation of an advert hoc committee that may oversee the unification of the county’s well being care system.
As a part of the vote, county Supervisors Chris Lopez and Wendy Root Askew have been appointed to serve on the committee.
Root Askew famous that, after she broke her arm final 12 months, her physician gave her a referral for bodily remedy. That referral allowed her to schedule her appointment in the identical well being care workplace inside 5 minutes.
“Proper now, our county clinic sufferers do not have that skill to have that type of built-in care,” she mentioned. “They need to have that type of built-in care, and the accountability for creating this method lies on us.”
County well being and Natividad officers didn’t give a timeline for when the system might be totally built-in, as it can require a number of steps, together with price analyzes and the alignment of medical file archives.
