DaVita, a kidney care provider, has teamed up with the YMCA to offer free health screenings across multiple cities.
The community health initiative is intended to proactively assess individuals at risk for chronic conditions. DaVita will host free health education sessions and the no-cost screenings for diabetes, hypertension and renal disease. The screenings will take place at local YMCA locations, as well as other places like churches. The initiative begins today in Orlando, before moving on to Houston and Los Angeles next month. The cities were identified as having significant barriers to healthcare access.
Chronic kidney disease affects more than 35 million Americans, and up to 9 in 10 adults with the condition don’t know they have it. And the disease often comes with comorbidities. Health screenings are fundamental to timely interventions that can slow disease progression, DaVita executives said.
“Ultimately, they have better outcomes in the long run,” Jeffrey Giullian, M.D., DaVita’s chief medical officer, told Fierce Healthcare. By the time people come to DaVita, he added, they may have been living with diabetes and high blood pressure for two decades. “People rarely get kidney disease in isolation… it absolutely can become a vicious cycle, if we’re not careful.”
DaVita has local providers and community-based organization partners that support its work year-round. For these types of events, DaVita can typically screen several hundred people per day, according to Giullian. To ensure longitudinal care, it will refer individuals to local resources. “If we’re going to have a real sustainable impact in these communities, we have to meet people where they are,” Giullian said.
“We needed to impact behavior change and lifestyle change, and it’s very difficult to do that in the short amount of time that we’re able to have with patients,” Gloria Winters, chief health officer for the YMCA’s national resource office, told Fierce Healthcare. The real way to make an impact is to go upstream, she said.
There are more than 2,600 local YMCAs. The organization already has programming around diabetes prevention, weight management, nutrition and blood pressure monitoring. It also has its own EHR for providers and community-based organizations to easily communicate about members. A collaboration like the one with DaVita was a natural fit.
“We are where people live, work and play,” Winters said. “The access point that we have and the trust that we have within the community is high.”
As the U.S. continues to shift from a fee-for-service to a value-based care model, Giullian said, the focus is on keeping entire populations healthier. “Moving upstream, identifying patients earlier is absolutely at the crux of all of that,” he said, citing the popular adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.