FW-HTF-P: D-CCC: Digital Health for Future of Community-Centered Care

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Healthcare systems in the USA face challenges in developing organized and affordable platforms that increase the reach and services to communities. Existing community-centered care (CCC) models rely on caregivers to provide critical medical assistance in a community setting, particularly for elderly, disabled and vulnerable populations. These CCC models extend the reach of home-delivered services by employing community healthcare workers (CHWs) who provide the necessary care for the community. Since these CHWs are trained and supervised by registered nurses (RNs), this CCC model suffers from an inability to scale in a cost-effective manner while providing personalized and quality care for the community. This Future of Work at the Human Technology Frontier planning grant lays the foundation for a new digital health enabled community-centered care (D-CCC) model that will transform the manual, restricted, and unstructured state of the current community healthcare landscape into a scalable, digital, and automated space. The D-CCC model will improve: the future of work – the nature of healthcare services delivered to home/community; the future of workers – training and empowering RNs and CHWs to improve quality of serving capabilities; and the future of technology – using AI-enabled cognitive Cyber-Physical System (CPS) models for novel and scalable healthcare services. The D-CCC model will achieve scalability by using technology to allow CHWs to serve an expanded patient population, including underserved, elderly, disabled and vulnerable groups. The planning grant will fill several gaps for successful launch of the D-CCC research vision. In particular, the planning grant plans to: 1) better understand community needs to analyze the range of desired services; 2) engage a community advisory board (CAB) to assess the requirements of future workers – CHWs and RNs – to digitally empower them for effective delivery of community centric services in a scalable, yet personalized manner; 3) conduct focus groups to gain perspectives about the efficient implementation and integration model of the D-CCC model in the community, as well as identify barriers and issues of most concern for workers and individuals from key stakeholders across the community spectrum, including patients, CHWs, CHW leaders, RNs, medical centers, non-profit healthcare organizations, public/government advisors, and other community members; 4) conduct feasibility and needs assessment studies that bring together multiple stakeholders and bridge the gap between human-work-workers-technology frontiers; and 5) hold visioning workshops to lay a solid foundation for an actionable research agenda that will yield tangible results. This planning grant will formulate such a basis, assemble the requisite research team, identify key members of an initial CAB, and outline the roadmap for realizing research objectives that will be included in a future full FW-HTF proposal to address these problems This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.