Healthcare and Homelessness: A Battle of Data Sharing

 For decades, healthcare and homelessness have butted heads in regards to data sharing and medical records. Many hospitals, for the longest time, held medical records under a patients permanent address, causing issues for the homeless to keep up date on their charts. Thanks to Community Solutions' "Built for Zero", a new pilot project that started in 2020 to help the homeless receive better healthcare, hospitals are now allowed to share patient information with services that the patient may be receiving. In Washington County, Oregon, this new pilot project is taking effect, with Kaiser Permanente partnering with local health organizations to help rapidly increase information on ones medical history.

Photo: Oregon Live

“We want to make sure we’re protecting the rights and data of vulnerable individuals,” said Ruth Adkins, the government relations manager at Kaiser Permanente Northwest. Adkins talked about the process of implementing this program into their hospital, claiming that the process of creating a data sharing agreement was difficult and quite long. There were many problems around patient confidentiality and data sharing, Adkins mentioned that they struggled to find a middle ground where it protected the patients records while sharing it with those that could help the patient outside the hospital. Allie Sheridan, a business operations manager for the Homeless Services Division for Washington County explained a bit about some of the problems they had faced previously. “This could be something like, someone has an upcoming cardiologist appointment that’s really important that they make it to. This could be someone’s currently in the ICU at one of our local hospitals,” she said. “It could also be we’re seeing that this individual has utilized the emergency department 40 times in the past three months and they really need to get connected to clinic-based care.”

With this new program, the homeless are now able to have medications delivered directly to their shelter. Sheridan also claimed that this project would help educate housing services on understanding why assigning a PCP is important for individuals. It allows those in the housing services to see that certain individuals have upcoming appointments, or missed appointments, and helps the hospitals know where patients may be, and how to connect to closer clinics/hospitals. In Sacramento, this same project took off with flying colors, showing less emergency room visits and better health among the homeless community. Local leaders hope that this will be the foundation for a new system of communication in health care, and look forward to seeing it implementing in more cities around the country.

More information about Built For Zero can be found here