Success Story: Patient-Centric Care in Indiana Racks Up Recognitions
Nurses at VPCHC use planning tools to help manage care. These processes work well to produce positive patient outcomes and help VPCHC diagnose and manage their patients’ hypertension more effectively.
Valley Professionals Community Health Center (VPCHC)
Valley Professionals Community Health Center (VPCHC) provides primary care, behavioral health, dental, and other services at eight sites in west central Indiana and via a mobile clinic that visits 14 schools. Their enduring commitment to hypertension control in mostly rural and often lower income communities has seen notable successes.
VPCHC has expanded their best practices to achieve a blood pressure control rate of 80% or higher in seven of their nine sites: Bloomingdale and Rockville (2020), North Terre Haute (2022), and Cayuga, Clinton, Crawfordsville, and South Terre Haute (2023).
A Seven-Time Champion’s How-To
What is VPCHC’s secret to success? Their exceptional quality improvement (QI) team knows how to build on past successes and support sites that are making progress toward 80% hypertension control.
The Vice-President & Chief Quality Officer and the Director of Quality and Community Resources both understand that the real work happens at the encounters with the patients. These administrators see their job as helping to assure that the caregivers have what they need to be successful. Working with each site, they assisted in improving internal processes and staff education to ensure that all relevant patient data are documented electronically. Caregivers then have complete information for identifying and managing hypertension—VPCHC’s most frequently diagnosed chronic disease.
Nurses use a pre-visit planning tool that taps a patient’s earlier test results in search of hypertension symptoms, prompting additional steps such as follow-up calls or appointments and extra blood pressure checks. Such procedures, thoughtfully designed to work well for both staff and patients, produce excellent outcomes across the board.
Staff Engagement Matters
Celebrating staff excellence and milestones have been crucial to VPCHC’s multiple Champion recognitions. Since 2018, the QI team has organized a friendly competition to provide the best care across 31 measures, incentivizing teams to work even harder on boosting their performance in controlling hypertension. The result has been a wealth of VPCHC Hypertension Champions tending thoughtfully and effectively to underserved populations in Indiana.
With the help from on-site community health workers, care teams screen patients at each site to identify the social determinants of health that may be barriers to wellness. Many community members whom VPCHC serve live below the poverty level and in healthy food deserts. Many community members also must travel long distances to reach a clinic. Staff assess patients’ resources and address their needs—offering transportation support and access to on-site food pantries.
Ensuring that patients understand and can afford their medications and sending blood pressure cuffs home with patients who need them most for the purpose of engaging in self-measured blood pressure monitoring have also advanced the hypertension control mission. The overall patient-centric approach across sites has been a winning strategy to make high-quality heart health care available to all whom the centers serve.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to the four newest Hypertension Control Champions, Valley Professionals Community Health Center’s Cayuga, Clinton, Crawfordsville, and South Terre Haute sites! Million Hearts® appreciates the health center-wide dedication to both staff and patient engagement and taking a patient-centric approach to improving hypertension control in support of our shared goal of preventing heart attacks and strokes.