New Partnership Will Expand Addiction Services to Youth and Young Adults (YYA)

 

Care ZONE by the Numbers

Between January 2018 through June 2019, CareZONE staff have logged >6,600 harm reduction outreach encounters at all clinical sites and distributed 2,281 life-saving Naloxone kits. The medical staff have seen 228 unique patients who participated in 796 clinical visits for a variety of health care services. The program continues to expand access to addiction treatment with over 477 prescriptions provided for medication for addiction treatment for 103 unique patients. The CareZONE team is also preparing for expanded hours and plans to launch two additional clinical sessions in the West End and Dudley Square in the coming weeks.

Next Steps for Program Evaluation

Having demonstrated the demand and need for mobile addiction services during the CareZONE pilot, The Kraft Center has now granted two awards to research teams to advance the second phase of program evaluation. Dr. Danielle Fine, a research fellow in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, along with Drs. Travis Baggett and Zirui Song will be evaluating the effect of CareZONE on health service utilization, assessing cost offsets associated with the program, and determining the acceptability and appropriateness of the CareZONE delivery model among homeless and marginally housed individuals. Additionally, Dr. Thomas Stopka, Associate Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, along with Dr. Claudia Santelices, an anthropologist at Northeastern University, is conducting an evaluation of enhanced harm reduction strategies in use by the program and its harm reduction partners at AHOPE. Both projects will inform the development, refinement, and potential return on investment of mobile addiction programs such as  CareZONE.

 

On April 29, the RIZE Massachusetts Foundation hosted a Mobile Addiction Services Convening in Marlborough, where organizations from across the state shared their efforts and experiences in mobilizing addiction services. We welcomed MA Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mary Lou Sudders, who led a group discussion about addiction services, including harm reduction programming across the Commonwealth. Secretary Sudders chaired the state's Harm Reduction Commission whose report in March included a recommendation to expand mobile health programming to address the opioid epidemic statewide. To read the Harm Reduction Commission report, click here . At the convening, the CareZONE team presented our working model and shared lessons learned to help other organizations looking to implement mobile programming.  Future convenings will focus on fostering a culture of harm reduction and increasing readiness and capacity for mobile addiction program implementation.

We are excited to announce that two programs led by Kraft Center Executive Director, Dr. Elsie Taveras, were recently awarded federal grants. The National Institutes of Health has funded the STIMULATE Grant to disseminate Connect for Health , an evidence-based childhood obesity screening and management program, at Boston Medical Center. This initiative looks to improve the quality of obesity care delivered in pediatric primary care settings.

 

Dr. Taveras's team has also been awarded a three-year grant from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to better engage fathers in the first 1,000 days period. This project will leverage the extensive infrastructure created for the First 1,000 Days Program , a unique Collective Impact initiative in the Greater Boston area funded by The Boston Foundation to prevent obesity and related racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities among mother-infant dyads in early life.

For this edition's alumni spotlight, we are pleased to feature Dr. Audrey Provenzano, a graduate of the Kraft Center Fellowship program, class of 2015! In her years since finishing the program, Audrey has continued to focus her work on community health care. At  Dimock Community Health Center, she developed and implemented a program to prevent the risk of falls and went on to become the health center's Director of Quality. She then joined the MGH Chelsea Health Center where she became a Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) clinician champion examining quality issues related to SUDs care. In February 2019, she became the Unit Chief of Adult Medicine at MGH Chelsea Health Center, which she describes as being both a great challenge and opportunity.

 

Audrey is also the host of a podcast called  Review of Systems ab out the changing healthcare landscape  in partnership with the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. Episodes focus on primary care health services research, QI, medical humanities, and improving primary care for patients and providers. Audrey regularly writes about healthcare that covers various topics, such as opioids, caregiving, and screens in medicine. We at The Kraft Center are very proud of Audrey's many accomplishments which embody the mission of the Center's Fellowship Program of training champions in community health! 

Our summer intern, Annabelle Aguirre, has been hard at work on multiple community health projects across The Kraft Center. Annabelle has assisted in evaluating  the implementation of the Build Our Kids' Success (BOKS) program in Revere, MA. BOKS is a free physical activity program that improves children's physical and mental health through movement.  In addition to her work on BOKS, Annabelle has assisted with the planning and development of our CareZONE mobile health expansion to youth and young adults, community engagement campaigns, and communications initiatives. She has attended community meetings, participated in site visits, and designed program brochures to support Kraft Center programs. We cannot believe her last day with us is in early August! Her dedication and enthusiasm will be greatly missed!