The Oregon Health Authority wants to expand access to care, grow the state’s behavioral health system and connect more families to preventive care.
These targets form the basis of the agency’s goal of eliminating health care inequities by 2030. Health officials said on Tuesday: Strategic Planning This plan will guide that effort. It covers the next three years and covers a wide range of areas, including access to care, behavioral health care and tribal health.
The goal is to eliminate systemic inequities in the health care system that lead to disparate health outcomes for different communities, including people of color, ethnic minorities and immigrants. Inequities can lead to life-altering consequences, such as a lower life expectancy for Black and Native Americans than white people. Oregon residents in rural areas struggle to access health care and suffer from higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and depression.
Inequalities can manifest in many ways and impact an individual’s overall health, including lack of access to health care providers, unaffordable housing, and lack of interpreter services at doctor’s offices.
“These inequalities go beyond health statistics,” health director-general Sejal Hathi said at a news conference. “They rob people of their dignity, their opportunities and their quality of life. When it comes to health, we are all connected.”
The plan covers five broad areas:
- Expand the behavioral health system with more staff, preventive services for children and youth, and more beds in treatment facilities.
- Expand access to affordable health care. This includes working to get Oregonians covered through insurance, such as the Oregon Health Plan, state Medicaid, or a newly launched program for people who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The state also wants to increase the number of health care providers through a loan forgiveness program and increase the number of certified traditional health practitioners who have cultural ties to the communities they serve.
- Increased services to keep families healthy, including preventive health services, especially for new parents before and after birth, and the introduction of housing and nutrition benefits provided by state Medicaid plans under new programs.
- Working with Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes. Officials have met with tribal members and hired consultants to help finalize goals in this area.
- Allowing health officials to be more responsive to communities with a more diverse workforce.
Measuring success
Officials will monitor progress by tracking a variety of areas, such as recording the number of people who contract preventable diseases. They will also track access to health care and workforce numbers and create a public dashboard showing progress.
But the 42-page plan doesn’t provide specific targets for each area. For example, the agency aims to reduce the number of emergency department visits for behavioral health checks, but no specific goal is set.
Asked about the lack of metrics, Hattie said the state will track performance internally.
“In addition to high-level performance indicators for each strategy, every action has outcome and process indicators associated with it that we track internally through our internal performance management system,” Hattie said. “They’re not at a granular level that would be of public interest, but we do try to incorporate those monitoring plans into our implementation planning efforts.”
The plan calls for increasing the number of behavioral health treatment beds statewide, but does not provide a goal for the end of 2027. The state needs 3,700 additional beds. Reports It was published in June.
It’s unclear how many more beds the state will be able to add over the three-year period.
Hattie said the province will release a dashboard in the coming weeks outlining goals for different types of beds and how many have been funded from 2021 to date.
Currently, the state can treat about 4,000 people in residential facilities and plans to add nearly 400 more beds by fall 2025.
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The Need for Community Support
It’s unclear how much it will cost to achieve the plan’s goals, but much of the work will depend on state-backed providers. The state Legislature has allocated more than $230 million since 2021 for behavioral health housing and residential treatment programs after years of underfunding.
But health care providers told the Capital Chronicle that while health officials acknowledge the urgent need, they have been slow to disburse funds, especially for “ground-ready” projects.
Critics say the bureaucracy needs to be speeded up.
Health officials also need community support, which Hattie said state officials will address. “In the coming weeks, OHA will be issuing a call to action across the state, mobilizing our collective will and calling on our state and local government partners, health payers, academia, philanthropy and corporate providers to step up and take bold action to advance our strategic plan,” Hattie said.
Health care workers who attended the news conference with Hattie said they were encouraged by the state’s focused approach. Brenda Johnson, CEO of La Clinica, a migrant and community health care provider in the Medford area, said the effort is meaningful to those most affected.
“Here in my community in Southern Oregon, I see tragedies happening in the lives of people who have limited or no access to health care – people who delay getting care or travel long distances and at high cost to get care,” said Johnson, who also serves as chair of the Oregon Health Policy Commission.
The plan marks the culmination of an effort that began in 2019 with extensive community engagement that helped inform Oregon’s pandemic response when the state released metrics showing vaccination coverage in hard-to-reach areas.
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