Whole person care is the integration of medicine and social services, to prevent disease and adverse physical, social, emotional, and behavioral health outcomes. It is an emerging care model that makes holistic care and case management crucially important for community-based organizations and health care networks.
When someone arrives at a health and human services provider or agency, they are bringing along more than just their physical body. This person’s social history and behavioral needs contribute significantly to their overall well-being, not just the diseases or symptoms they present with.
Addressing all parts of their situation—not just the traditional, physical ones—is known as whole person care, and it’s an emerging model of holistic, integrative care that is spreading across the United States to address disease and adverse social determinants of health (SDoH).
Often, individuals with lower income—those who rely most on social services—experience more adverse SDoH outcomes. These determinants (i.e., access to healthy foods, literacy, and community environment) often impact the non-physical side of health. By incorporating whole person care into community services, health and human service providers can improve public health and prevent or at least mitigate unnecessary emergency services (i.e., ER visits, arrests for nonviolent offenders, homeless services), all of which saves the community on scarce sources.
Whole Person Care at a Glance
In this chart, we break down the broad strokes of a community model for whole person care.
Why Is Whole Person Care Spreading?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have proposed a rule to “strengthen primary care, expand access to behavioral health, oral health, and caregiver training services, maintain telehealth flexibilities, and expand access to screening for colorectal cancer and vaccinations for hepatitis B,” in the physician fee schedule (PFS) for Medicare earlier this year. Why?
It’s because human well-being relies on a multi-dimensional approach to make lasting improvements. For example, an individual with HIV will likely worsen significantly and quickly if they also experience homelessness. (It’s one reason Housing First has become the preferred direction for Continuums of Care [CoCs] throughout the United States.)
Whole person care pilots are also proliferating in large states like California, where its Medi-Cal programs are now including nontraditional health care services.
One reason whole person care is emerging as a more popular model is the research finding that Medicare, which is typically reserved for elder or disabled populations, shoulders the majority of emergency department visits in rural and metropolitan areas. Of course, some issues with elderly or disabled individuals can’t be resolved through preventive care, but emergency room visits are famously more expensive, and it’s well known that the more insurers have to pay, the more health care costs increase across for everyone.
How to Implement Whole Person Care in Your Community
Whole person care requires a shared mission among community-based organizations and health care providers. That means it won’t happen overnight. But the good news? Technology can make it a lot easier.
For example, in three of the nation’s top-performing CoCs, care coordination (also known as coordinated entry in the homelessness services world) played a central role in reducing homelessness by significant margins, developing partnerships with many community-based agencies, and capturing client consent and data governance with secure data management platforms. (Take a look at these webinars or this white paper to learn how the Continuums of Care in Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta accomplished so much with coordinated care and Eccovia’s case management platform, ClientTrack.)
One noteworthy case study in whole person care is that of Los Angeles County’s health services department, which provided supportive housing to frequent users of LA county systems, which led to a decrease in health care costs by 72%.
When health and human services coordinate between each other with good data management platforms, they can share data more effectively while capturing client consent, fulfill their individual missions, and prevent adverse SDoH outcomes before people become at risk.
Eccovia is committed to using whole person care to better health and human services, which is why our case management platform ClientTrack® is an industry leader for whole person care. We help programs record data, analyze it in meaningful ways, and coordinate with other community services to maximize impact.
The more we understand about whole person care, the more effective our programs can become. Treating the whole person—all aspects of them—helps create a more substantial whole person care approach, which in turn better serves each individual.
Reach out today to learn more about whole person care and how you can include it today.
