In this episode

Asian Health Services (AHS) stands out for their innovative approach to whole-person care for their diverse patient population. George Lee, MD, Chief Innovation Officer at AHS, breaks down AHS’ mission, key initiatives, and the creative approach that helps AHS serve their patients well. Here are some of the strategies he discusses:

• A whole-person, culturally informed approach matters.
• Target innovative interventions to small patient groups, then grow from there.
• Support can help bridge the “digital divide” for patients.

“[Imagine] a faucet running and spilling water on the floor. A lot of our current healthcare today is mopping the floor – [for example,] being able to have the best treatments for diabetes. But that’s still just mopping the floor. The goal is to use prevention to turn off the faucet.”

– George Lee, MD

 

Key takeaways

Lee discussed some of the initiatives that help Asian Health Services deliver whole-person care and address care gaps. Here are his takeaways:

A whole-person, culturally informed approach matters.

AHS’ mission is to provide whole-person care, with a focus on Asian communities and underserved patients. AHS serves patients in 14 languages in addition to English, including Burmese, Mien, Mongolian, Tagalog, and Khmer, recognizing that “83% of our patients experience some type of linguistic isolation,” said Dr. Lee.

“The overall vision is that our patients deserve the same type of care that we expect for ourselves,” said Dr. Lee. “You don’t want to have disparity and differences in the system of care.”

AHS’ whole-person care includes an innovative dental clinic where patients can receive mental health and wellness screenings during the visit – helping break down stigma around mental health treatment in the AAPI community. Dr. Lee emphasizes this creative, culturally informed, and patient-focused approach when discussing preventive care interventions.

“The Asian population is often treated as monolithic on surveys,” he said. When surveying patients about their willingness to use technology, “we broke it down to survey our Chinese patients, our Vietnamese patients, our Korean patients,” to determine if specific patient populations experienced particular barriers.

“We do teaching kitchens, where we teach some of our patients how to cook in a more healthy way,” said Dr. Lee. “We’re working through a recipe but also discussing things like, ‘how do you make healthy substitutions?’ And we ask them to bring a friend – changing the way a household cooks and eats isn’t just an individual decision but a community one,” he said.

Target innovative interventions to small patient groups, then grow from there.

Dr. Lee began a remote monitoring program for patients with high blood pressure in 2020, starting with the patients who experienced the most challenges with management.

“We looked for patients who were monolingual, who had uncontrolled hypertension, and who had never had any sort of telehealth visit or video visit. We decided to see if we could bring care to them. And so we started off with a small pilot of about 50 patients, and by the end of it 89% were at their blood pressure goal or had made significant improvement,” said Dr. Lee.

Dr. Lee said that this small-group pilot allowed AHS to complete important steps like patient journey mapping and monitor challenges like how to troubleshoot with patients who forget how to use the devices.

Now, AHS has expanded remote monitoring to continuous glucose monitoring, and “we’re looking at ways to expand [further],” said Dr. Lee.

Support can help bridge the “digital divide” for patients.

Dr. Lee is passionate about bridging the “digital divide” for AHS’ patients and ensuring that everyone has access to technology that can help them be healthier. One of the factors in the success of the remote monitoring program, he said, is ensuring that patients have tech support.

“We’ve hired a digital health advocate, who helps not just onboard patients but also troubleshoot,” he said.

AHS also surveyed their patients to understand any hesitations or barriers that might be preventing them from participating in programs like remote monitoring.

“86% of people were very willing to use video visits and things like that, but of those, 53% said they didn’t want to use it because they didn’t know how or didn’t have the tools. So if we were to provide them support, we can get more patients to use it,” he said.

The AHS team also recognized that more apps and logins created more challenges for patients, so they intentionally simplified the patient portal to help patients use it more easily following the survey. “Can we use biometrics to log in, or provide audio files instead of written information for our patients with lower literacy rates?” he said.