Puerto Rico’s health system continues to face longstanding funding issues, hospital financial struggles, and a shortage of healthcare workers. Fragmented as the health system is, we have a huge opportunity: to achieve true patient-centricity and fix the provider journey in the healthcare sector.
What can we do to improve health equity in Puerto Rico? Listen to this episode of the V2A Consulting podcast, V2ATalks🎙where our director, Graciela Salcedo; Joaquín Rodríguez, leader of V2A's Health practice, and María Fernanda Levis, founder and CEO of Impactivo, discuss health equity and the social determinants of health.
In recent years, most healthcare conversations have been sprinkled with terms like “health disparities,” “health inequalities,” or “health equity.” Per the World Health Organization (WHO), health equity is defined as the absence of unfair and avoidable or remediable differences in health among population groups.
Our Social Determinants of Health dashboard was developed to help understand the conditions in which the people of Puerto Rico are born, grow, work, live and age that shape their health. V2A’s SDoH Dashboard provides key factors at the municipality and neighborhood levels, including socio-demographic data, educational attainment, employment, occupation, transportation, housing, internet access, family composition and healthcare access, among others … all visualized as a Puerto Rico heat map.
Current Medicaid funding proposal does not resolve Puerto Rico’s program needs in the long-term. The island is at a disadvantage to meet service access which impacts health outcomes of a significant portion of our population.
The crisis brought upon all of us by COVID-19 has made both citizens and lawmakers demand quick action and trustworthy solutions, as well as made us all question the benefits of globalization. While producers have logically favored moving supply chains overseas to optimize their cost base, the reality is that neglecting a reliable domestic supply of certain goods has become a national security issue. Pharmaceutical products are a clear example. This report is meant to highlight Puerto Rico’s readiness to insert itself into the COVID-19 pandemic response and the pharmaceutical repatriation effort that will likely follow
In general, Puerto Rico hospitals score lower than the national average in quality metrics, based on reports from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare database. The difference is significant in metrics related to readmission, mortality, and Emergency Department (ED) care. In this Insight we analyze several of these outcomes and explore the possible reasons behind them.
Hospitals play a key role in the provision of health services to Puerto Rico citizens. In recent years they have been operating in a complicated environment where several industry trends have been hurting their profitability. That situation has only been aggravated by Hurricane María. Consolidation, both across the hospital sector but also vertically along the health system may help turn these trends around.
Con la temporada de huracanes a la vuelta de la esquina, hay que recordar que las personas con problemas cardíacos y respiratorios, diabéticos y enfermos de Alzheimer son los más vulnerables, y que los accidentes, los suicidios y las septicemias se multiplican tras un huracán. Aparte de ver las causas del aumento de muertes por María, en este Insight nos preguntamos qué se ha hecho para mitigar el impacto de futuros huracanes.
