Very few people want to go to the hospital. Even fewer want to be readmitted after an illness or injury. Now there's a new local program designed to keep you from going back.
It's called THRIVE, the Translational Health Initiative, a collaboration between Northern Arizona University and Northern Arizona Healthcare. Mark Carroll is a physician at Flagstaff Medical Center and co-leads THRIVE. "What do folks need when they're sick"," he asks. "Sometimes they need rides to appointments, rides to the grocery store, help shopping. Sometimes they need help with housing when they leave the hospital. So how do we create that awareness and understand what those 360 degrees needs are for folks?"
One of the project's initiatives is to follow the patient into the community - and sometimes into the home - combining care with research. The focus is to study how well people recover and what resources are available to help them.
Robert Trotter is an anthropologist at NAU. He's working with the THRIVE project to study the relationship between culture and health. "We're building new models for providing health care, not only in the hospital, but transitions into the community," Trotter says. He adds, "we hope it breaks the cycle of a situation in which you'll have to do it all over again."
The founders of THRIVE call this approach Care Traffic Control: managing resources and information so home is the patient's final destination without another layover at the hospital.