COVID Collaborations: A Physician Assistant Program and Health Department Partnership.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the displacement of clinical-phase medical learners across the country. Physician assistant (PA) and other health professions programs were challenged to innovate and offer alternate learning experiences that would meet students' needs as future health care professionals. At the same time, local and state health departments were faced with quickly increasing their capacity for contact tracing and case investigation in response to the growing number of COVID-19 infections.

Just for Us: in-home care for frail elderly and disabled individuals with low incomes.

In response to increasing concerns about health care access, cost, and quality, Duke University Medical Center began a community-engaged, iterative, data-driven process in 1998 to develop innovative models to provide care earlier, more effectively, and at a lower cost. This commentary reviews Just for Us, an in-home care program launched in 2002 for low-income, frail elderly and disabled individuals.

Dynamics of patient targeting for care management in Medicaid: a case study of the Durham Community Health Network.

Targeting appropriate patients for care management is crucial to maximizing quality of care and cost-effectiveness in Medicaid care management programs. This study examined patient characteristics predicting selection for care management pre- and postmanagement changes at the Durham Community Health Network (DHCN), one of North Carolina's Medicaid primary care management networks. From the beginning, care managers were directed to target asthmatics, diabetics, and high-volume utilizers of health care, using an array of markers to identify patients who needed management.

Developing a framework for conducting economic evaluations of community-based health information technology interventions.

This study describes a framework for conducting economic analyses for health information technology (HIT) interventions, in the context of three interventions that are currently being implemented in a community-based health network caring for 17,779 Medicaid beneficiaries in Durham County, North Carolina. We show that if the HIT interventions were to redirect only 10% of low-severity emergency room encounters to outpatient care, it will result in $12,523 of monthly savings.

Assessing the potential economic value of health information technology interventions in a community-based health network.

Health information professionals recognize the need to demonstrate that the benefits of health information technological (HIT) interventions outweigh their costs. However, such cost-benefit analyses are rarely conducted for HIT interventions, due in part to the lack of a standard methodology. In this study, we describe how the U.