Journal of health care for the poor and underserved
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Health Care and Human Trafficking: We are Seeing the Unseen.
This study aimed to build the evidence base around human trafficking (HT) and health in the U.S. by employing a quantitative approach to exploring the notion that health care providers encounter this population. Furthermore, this study sought to describe the health care settings most frequented by victims of human trafficking. ⋯ While health care providers are serving this patient population, they do not consistently identify them as victims of human trafficking.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Implementation and Impact of the Affordable Care Act in U.S. Farmworker Communities.
Farmworkers are a unique population within rural communities and are often overlooked and undercounted. They face significant disparities in health and health care access compared with the general rural population. One goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to increase access to health care and health insurance for the country's most vulnerable and underserved populations. ⋯ Apart from anecdotal accounts, we lack the necessary data to assess the ACA's impact on farmworker communities. This commentary imparts information about farmworker enrollment in and barriers to accessing health insurance, collected through individual conversations, focus groups, interviews, and informal surveys. Based on identified challenges and limitations, we make policy recommendations to assess and improve the implementation and relevance of the ACA in farmworker communities.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Reducing Medical School Admissions Disparities in an Era of Legal Restrictions: Adjusting for Applicant Socioeconomic Disadvantage.
A diverse physician workforce is needed to increase access to care for underserved populations, particularly as the Affordable Care Act expands insurance coverage. Yet legal restrictions constrain the extent to which medical schools may use race/ethnicity in admissions decisions. ⋯ We found that socioeconomic and under-represented minority disparities in admissions could be eliminated while maintaining academic readiness. Adjusting applicant academic metrics using socioeconomic information on medical school applications may be a race-neutral means of increasing the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic diversity of the physician workforce.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
What Is the Potential of Community Paramedicine to Fill Rural Health Care Gaps?
Community paramedicine (CP) uses emergency medical services (EMS) providers to help rural communities increase access to primary care and public health services. This study examined goals, activities, and outcomes of 31 rural-serving CP programs through structured interviews of program leaders and document review. Common goals included managing chronic disease (90.3%); and reducing emergency department visits (83.9%), hospital admissions/readmissions (83.9%), and costs (83.9%). ⋯ Programs provided assessment, testing, preventive care, and post-discharge services. Reported outcomes were promising, but few programs used rigorous evaluation methods. Rural-serving CP programs provided services to shift costs to less expensive settings and provide appropriate care where vulnerable patients live, but more evidence is needed that care is safe, effective, and economical.
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J Health Care Poor Underserved · Jan 2016
Language Access and Health Equity: Changes under the Affordable Care Act.
Health disparities between English-proficient and limited English-proficient (LEP) groups in the United States have been widely documented. Provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including increased funding to community health centers and resources to help consumers who are purchasing Marketplace coverage afford new access to health care for speakers of languages other than English, which includes more than 60 million individuals, one-third of whom are LEP. This commentary discusses the legislative precedent for, successes of, and potential future directions for the implementation of the ACA as it relates to language access, health disparities, health equity, access to health care, and the linguistic needs of the LEP population in the United States.