Innovation

The Community Health Roundtable (CHRT) initiative involves a comprehensive set of free resources to help community health centers operate more effectively and efficiently, thus enhancing the sustainability of their mission-driven focus on under served populations. The Roundtable is part of The Advisory Board Company’s strong commitment to impacting the broader community through employees’ pro-bono, voluntary contributions; of note, in 2013, The Advisory Board Company became the first for-profit organization of their size to achieve 100% voluntary participation in community service, with employees contributing up to 10 paid work hours per month toward pro-bono work. The Roundtable emerged from employees recognizing the central role community health centers play in delivering care and optimizing health outcomes, particularly for higher risk, more complex patients. This recognition led to many one-off volunteer projects with community health centers. The Roundtable was initiated as a more integrated, scalable strategy for maximally impacting community health centers. As community health centers are significantly resource-constrained, it’s difficult for these entities to access consultative resources that could enhance their ability to meet the ever-growing demand for health care services.

The Advisory Board Company has a significant breadth and depth of health care industry expertise, with hospital and health system members benefiting from the broad portfolio of content-specific research and resources. The employees secured leadership support to extend this extensive resource base to community health centers at no cost. Pilot phase engagement of 13 community health centers confirmed strong interest in accessing The Advisory Board Company content; in addition, the 2-day on-site employee externships resulted in a deeper understanding of day-to-day operations, key challenges, and topics of interest. Existing content, originally intended for hospital and health system executives, related to high priority topics for community health center leaders was then modified by research staff and posted to the Roundtable website for community health centers to access freely.

The content includes highly actionable, relevant research briefings on key industry trends, “best practice” case studies, tool kits, and blog-style articles on key issues. Examples of topics addressed include: engaging clinicians and other team members, hiring and on-boarding new staff, growing the business, building a patient-centered medical home, optimizing information technology, communicating impact to donors, and managing population health. Direct outreach calls by Roundtable relationship managers and monthly email newsletters alerting leaders to newly available content promote and sustain community health center engagement and impact. To date, 27 employees have contributed to the Roundtable initiative.

Inspiration

The inspiration for the Roundtable initiative comes from a “spirit of generosity,” with the model predicated on a willingness to give and to do so transparently; thus, content and expertise is shared with community health centers at no cost. It was realized that existing research completed for hospital and health system members could be repurposed to help community health centers enhance and sustain their provision of vital services to underserved communities where there is a tremendous need for accessible, high quality medical care. As community health centers face significant constraints, such as lack of time and financial resources, the inspiration was to provide concise, actionable research that enables these entities to better serve their patients by strengthening their clinical and operational processes and systems.

There are two primary motivations for the Roundtable initiative. The first is the intrinsic good for community health centers. The second was powerfully captured by Carolyn Swope, senior research analyst, who said, “I got involved with the Roundtable as a way to use the skills and knowledge I’m developing in my role for the benefit of these critically important providers. It’s been really fulfilling for me to see how valuable the Advisory Board’s work has the potential to be in supporting their mission and helping their underserved patients get the care they need.” (Community Health Roundtable handout).

Overall impact

The Roundtable initiative supports the overall mission of The Advisory Board Company, “to make healthcare better, education smarter, and our communities stronger.” By providing free research memberships to community health centers, the Roundtable serves the medically under served, under-insured or uninsured populations at absolutely no cost to the clinics or to patients receiving services. The Roundtable is making a difference in the way community health centers operate through the content, best practices, and success stories shared via the on-line platform. One metric that the Advisory Board is using to track its impact is by monitoring the number of Roundtable website hits (clicks) and website downloads of resource documents. This data demonstrates that the Advisory Board is making an impact.

Business benefit

The Advisory Board Company’s commercial hospital and health system member’s benefit from content prepared for the community health centers. Examples of these benefits include preserving community health centers’ contributions, enhancing partnerships in caring for at-risk populations, and achieving profitability under evolving payment reform models. According to Tali Warburg, Service Line Strategy Advisor Senior Analyst, “custom [hospital-community health center partnerships] research has been impactful to the Advisory Board’s paying members as they get insight into how community health centers impact emergency room visits, women’s health, and primary care, thus promoting future collaborations and cost savings.” (Advisory Board's 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility Report).

Another benefit is valuable professional development opportunities for The Advisory Board Company employees. In volunteering time to work on projects, staff develop leadership skills and promote cross-departmental partnerships. Community impact initiatives, such as the Roundtable, are unique and excellent career builders.

These benefits of the Advisory Board allowing employees time off for volunteering benefits the business and data is being tracked to formerly monitor the benefits. Both qualitative and anecdotal data on value to employees from participating in community impact initiatives is collected. Rachel Tappis, Director, Community Impact, told us, "employees doing pro-bono work are 42% more likely to be promoted and the highest employee engagement scores are linked to the community impact program."

Social and environmental benefit

Community health centers provide critical services to communities with high poverty levels and medically under served populations. As such, they have limited resources to devote to research that improves their services. The Roundtable provides this to them in a focused, concise and actionable way. As many community health centers face this same challenge, it’s more scalable and productive to access the Roundtable than each trying to reproduce something similar.

Interview

Rachel Tappis, Director, Community Impact