Help your community improve health care

Every month, we will bring you a column about community initiatives to improve the well-being of the people of Hawaii Island.

Along with the state and the nation, we have serious challenges in providing quality medical care and improving the health of our population, while bending the medical cost trend downwards. This is often referred to as the “triple aim” in health care: better quality, better health and lower costs.

To achieve any of these three aims, we must work on all three, or we will achieve none.

To succeed, we must create a community where everyone feels it is their civic duty to take care of their health and where everyone helps each other to do so. This was our vision in establishing Community First, a local nonprofit organization to provide a place where medical, business and community leaders can come together to work together with the community’s strengths and interests in mind.

Community First is a call to action. We are facing a tsunami of health care costs. These costs are the biggest drivers of government deficits on the federal, state and county levels. They threaten the viability of our businesses and take money that could go to increasing salaries.

Today, it costs about $19,900 to insure a family. In five years, at 5 percent rate of growth, it will cost $25,300. The medical system cannot address this crisis by itself. The only long-term solution is for us, the community, to change thinking of health care as treating disease and think of it instead as caring for health. Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for improving their well-being, and as a community we need to help each other do this.

Community First’s inaugural initiative is the Hawaii Island Well-Being Challenge.

We’re challenging you to help yourself by taking an online, confidential well-being assessment. It’s a simple, concrete act toward taking personal responsibility for your own health. In helping yourself, you also will help the families in Puna cope with the destruction caused by Tropical Storm Iselle and the lava flowing toward them.

HMSA will donate $4 for every assessment done in November. Our goal is to get 10,000 assessments and donate $40,000 to Puna. If we get enough assessments, on an aggregate basis they also can help us intelligently improve well-being in our communities.

Here’s how you can help:

1. Take the assessment by visiting www.hawaiiwellbeing.org and click “Take the Challenge.” This will take you to the HMSA site to register and do the assessment.

2. Forward this to your friends and family and ask them to help. As of Nov. 6, we only had 274 assessments done. If Mayor Kenoi can do the Ironman, all of us can do a well-being assessment. We really need your help. In addition to promoting the well-being assessments, we are currently working on three other initiatives:

1. End high blood pressure. Working with the University of Hawaii at Hilo School of Nursing, the East Hawaii Independent Physicians Association, and KTA’s Pharmacy Department, we are creating a campaign around school children, employers and primary care providers. The focus will be for nursing students to educate sixth-graders about the dangers of high blood pressure, equip them with digital blood pressure monitors, and have them take readings of family and friends. Successful pilots were completed at Connections Public Charter School and E.B. DeSilva Elementary School. In the spring of 2015, we hope to expand this program to 10 elementary schools and create opportunities for interested students to have more experiences in health care.

2. End uninformed and unnecessarily painful dying. With Baby Boomers approaching the end of life, unless we stop the unwanted, intensive medical services in the last few months and weeks of life, there will be an explosion of costs without value. If we knew and followed the wishes of people for care at the end of life, however, we could allow more people to die more gracefully, fully honoring the choices of all and have more resources for other critical services.

3. End medical homelessness. Every resident of Hawaii County should be in the medical home of a primary care provider. Hawaii County will be launching an educational campaign to encourage every resident to get a primary care provider as an essential step to caring for health. As a community, we need to ensure there is access to primary care for everyone.

Please join us in these initiatives. A healthy community starts with you.

This column was prepared by Community First, a nonprofit organization led by KTA’s Barry Taniguchi and supported by a volunteer board of local community leaders. Community First recently was established to help the community respond to the health care cost crisis and support initiatives that change health care from just treating disease to caring for health.