Spokane County
Medical Society Foundation
About SCMSF
SCMSF initiatives, which include Project Access and the Hot Spotters Group, are based on tested models that are part of a broad, grassroots effort to bring order and efficiency to what is often a frustratingly complex and counterproductive system—a system that allows too many people to fall through the cracks at great and unnecessary cost to the community at large. With your help, we can demonstrate that compassion and fiscal responsibility are not mutually exclusive goals and that innovative collaboration is the best catalyst for deep and lasting change.
Hot Spotters
The Spokane Hot Spotters Community Action Group is working to stabilize the community’s most medically and behaviorally complex clients. The program builds on successful national models for wrapping services around the most frequent utilizers of emergency services. This population accesses the health care system in a highly inefficient manner that comes at a great cost to the community at-large and results in stagnant or declining long-term health prospects for the client. Hot Spotters Care Coordinators facilitate intensive coordination between community providers with a goal of long-term stabilization, broad-based improvement in the patient’s medical and behavioral health outlook and reduced costs across the system.
Connect with Us
WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU DRIVE CHANGE
‹TOGETHER WE WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE.
‹TEL:
(509) 532-8877
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Project Access
Through its flagship initiative, Project Access, the Spokane County Medical Society Foundation solicits and coordinates donated specialty care for residents of Spokane County who are uninsured and earning 200% or less of the Federal Poverty Level. This means that when a single, working mom making $19,000 as a full-time restaurant server cannot afford to have a painful ovarian cyst removed, Project Access finds a specialist who will donate the needed care. In 2012, Project Access connected 1,025 uninsured patients with over $11 million in care.
News
SCMSF Role in Spokane Community Court
2013 began a period of rapid and exciting change for the Spokane County Medical Society Foundation. As we prepared for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to significantly reduce the Project Access workload, it became clear that the knowledge we’ve gained and the networks we’ve built over the years could—and should—be effectively applied to other gaps in our community’s public health system. Spokane's new Community Court is a perfect place to start
What is a Community Health Worker?
It’s 7:25am on a Wednesday morning and Sarah Bates is standing in the Alley between 2nd and 3rd off of Howard Street with a dozen or so folks who have migrated from beneath Spokane’s downtown underpasses and various panhandling corners to be here.
Hot Spotters in the Spokesman Review
Randall Sluder has laid his head in a lot of downtown spots over the past 13 years. Few were comfortable, and few his own. He spent a lot of nights simply wherever he could – or, more to the point, wherever he ended up, so drunk he couldn’t remember. Doorways, hallways, anywhere he could find. Fire crews hauled him to the emergency room more than 50 times last year. But for the past two weeks, he has called a nice, new, clean one bedroom rental house near Latah Creek his home. And if he, and the significant number of people who are working to help him, have their way, he’ll be there for a while.