IMPACT
The Twin Cities are widely recognized as one of the healthiest and most prosperous communities in the nation. However, this reputation clouds the wide health and socioeconomic disparities between Black, Indigenous, Latino, Hmong, and other cultural communities and the White population. The FUHN clinics are the ones leading to change healthcare for Minnesota’s most underserved populations. Our collective efforts have improved service access, clinical quality, and patient satisfaction/engagement while reducing overall costs to Minnesota’s Medicaid program.
Below are examples of our impact.
A recent (2021) white paper from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention described FUHN’s pharmacy care coordination program in which FUHN pharmacists are a shared resource providing medication management to primary health clinics (PHC) in the network (not all FUHN PHCs have their own pharmacy staff).
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The paper concluded that not only did medication management improve, but that the program improved clinical outcomes, and increases patient satisfaction and engagement.
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FUHN is collaborating with the University of Minnesota’s College of Pharmacy which received a multi-year grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2021 to assess and analyze the impact of pharmacists in their roles of providing comprehensive medication management at transitions of care from the hospital to FUHN PHCs.
FUHN is recognized as having formed the first virtual Medicaid Safety Net ACO in the country. Health Care Finance News highlighted FUHN in their Disruptive Innovators series saying,
“Many of the accountable care organizations in the U.S. are hospitals and primary care provider networks banding together to provide care. A group of federally qualified health centers in the Minneapolis [St. Paul] area has broken the mold by creating the first safety-net ACO [in the country].”
Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, the “think tank” of the ACO concept, took a significant interest in FUHN’s progress and used FUHN as a case study.
Publications and organizations have highlighted our pharmacy results, including:
Academic Pharmacy Now, "Fierce Collaborators: The Federally Qualified Urban Health Network provides a model for collaboration that includes pharmacists as part of primary care teams serving low-income populations," 2021, p. 8-9.
GTMR Institute Case Study, Federally Qualified Urban Health Network (FUHN) Use Case - Get The Medications Right (gtmr.org)