Last year, Cherokee Health Systems (CHS), a Federally Qualified Health Center in East Tennessee and surrounding counties, served over 65,000 patients at 19 health centers, telehealth visits, and a mobile unit. CHS provides primary care, behavioral health, dentistry, optometry, and pharmacy services to its communities, which have increased since 2019 in special populations, including homeless patients, agricultural workers, and patients in public housing. Now, with new funding, CHS aims to help close the gap in health disparities among the communities it serves by applying data-driven analytics.

Advocates for Community Health (ACH), in collaboration with UnitedHealthcare Community & State, recently announced that CHS was one of two recipients receiving a $100,000 grant to invest in community health center emerging technologies. In the second round of seed funding of the Community Health Entrepreneur Challenge, CHS and Lone Star Circle of Care in Texas were selected as the winners from applicants who submitted project proposals utilizing emerging technology and data capacity initiatives to improve patient health outcomes, increase efficiencies, and achieve long-term cost savings.

The grant funding will help CHS build a data-driven and precision medicine approach to reducing disparities in care. “The advanced Health Equity Dashboard will allow users to access outcome data, by site, by provider, and by patient,” said Chief Executive Officer at Cherokee Health Systems Parinda Khatri, Ph.D. “This data will be used by care coordinators and community health workers to guide their outreach efforts, clinic teams to identify individuals requiring further attention, and clinicians to inform care planning,” she added.

CHS has embraced data analytics and uses personalized, data-driven interventions to treat patients. For example, CHS teams have identified sub-populations within its patient communities with racial disparities in childhood vaccination rates, and its Health Equity Committee and Clinical Quality team have used the information from the Health Equity Dashboard to conduct a deep dive into the contributing factors. They’re digging further into questions such as, “Are we not reaching out to schedule them for their vaccination appointments?”, “Are they not coming to any appointments?” and “Is transportation the barrier?”

“It turns out that the core issue is vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr. Khatri. “Scheduling more appointments and giving information about the benefits of vaccination is not sufficient to address their concerns.” She said, “We will need to actively engage, listen, and collaborate with these families, within a motivational interviewing framework, to help protect these children from serious health risks.”

While CHS has developed a robust analytics capability over the past decade, this next decade will be transformational as it builds a technology ecosystem.

“Our vision is to weave digital technology into every aspect of the organization rather than execute unrelated technology projects,” said Dr. Khatri. “Creating a portfolio of technology solutions that complement and strengthen each other as part of a whole will be critical to our efforts to improve health outcomes.”

To learn more about ACH’s Community Health Entrepreneur Challenge, please visit advocatesforcommunityhealth.org.