NACHC Clinical Care and Quality is dedicated to supporting clinical excellence in our nation’s Community Health Centers (CHCs). Focused on Clinical Workforce, Informatics, Quality, and Care Delivery, these resources below are a collection designed to empower the Care Team with essential tools and insights, contributing to ongoing improvements in clinical practices and healthcare quality within the CHC network.
These resources are updated frequently. We encourage you to revisit, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest information.
2024 – August
Get ahead of this year’s respiratory virus season with NACHC’s new continuing education course: Standards for Adult Immunization Practice: Optimizing Programs at Health Centers. This one-hour, no-cost course provides hands-on tools and standards to strengthen the ability for all health center staff to engage in best practices for adult immunizations and improve health outcomes. 1.0 CME is available for learners who complete the course and knowledge assessment. (Registration required).
HEART DISEASE & STROKE PREVENTION
Heart Health Hub: Your Source for Preventing Heart Attacks and Strokes
NACHC’s new Heart Health Hub houses a full range of resources for care teams, quality improvement professionals, and health center leaders looking for evidence-based strategies to control hypertension and manage cholesterol. This new web page gives users easy access to downloadable tools and training resources to help you and your patients feel motivated to prevent life-threatening risks associated with cardiovascular disease and stroke.
MATERNAL HEALTH
Improving Quality for Pregnancy & Postpartum Care Implementation Guide
This implementation guide is designed to empower health center controlled networks (HCCNs) and health center staff to improve and leverage data from electronic clinical data systems (ECDS) for the full continuum of women’s health care. This essential work will improve family planning, prenatal care, transition to primary care, and postpartum care to reduce maternal mortality, especially for the patients who need it most. Teams will learn to:
- Improve data completeness to reduce maternal mortality
- Improve patient care based on evidence-informed guidelines
- Enact systems change for patient-centered quality improvement.
HEALTH OBSERVANCES CALENDAR
2024 Health Center Calendar Toolkit
Planning your social media content calendars for fall and winter? Check out NACHC’s 2024 Health Center Calendar Toolkit. You will find customizable content and graphics to help your health center showcase its high-quality care services and resources.
SPECIAL VIDEO: CLINICAL EXCELLENCE & COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS: LEADERSHIP
This video highlights clinical excellence at community health centers. It brings clinical leadership to life, showing how the passion, excellence, and mission-driven workforce at community health centers is motivating clinical leaders to reach new heights.
We encourage you to share this brief video with health center boards and leadership teams when celebrating and acknowledging the impact of your health center clinicians.
2024 – June
Spotlight: Family Healthy Weight Program Implementation Guide
One of the best ways to improve health outcomes for children identified with obesity is access to quality Family Health Weight Programs (FHWP) and Intensive Health Behavior Lifestyle Treatment (IHBLT). These programs go beyond diagnoses and short counseling on nutrition and physical activity to provide tailored, long-term strategies for families. NACHC’s new FHWP Implementation Guide shares insights from three health centers that have integrated evidence-based FHWP into the care of their families and have witnessed significant improvements physical, socioemotional, and behavioral outcomes for those families. It’s designed to help other health centers do this work, avoid pain points, and set themselves and their families up for success. The FHWP Implementation Guide includes information on:
- leveraging leadership support
- planning for space and technology
- working through recruitment and retention goals
- collecting data and measuring success
- sustainability
HEART DISEASE & STROKE PREVENTION
Effects of Uncontrolled Blood Pressure (Infographic)
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is called the silent killer for a reason. Treating high blood pressure can save more than a person’s life. This one-page, easy-to-understand, patient education handout shares ways uncontrolled hypertension can impact a person’s health and life. It is an excellent resource for patients at risk for, or diagnosed with, hypertension, to help them understand the significant impact controlling their blood pressure can have on their health, family, and lifestyle.
HEALTH CENTER OPERATIONS: VALUE-BASED PAYMENT
Introduction to Value-Based Payment
This 10-minute learning module offers health centers an introduction to value-based care and value-based payment, why they matter to health centers, and some of the value-based payment opportunities available to them. The module also shares NACHC’s resources and tools supporting health center quality and performance improvement that can help advance value-based care and payment.
SPECIAL VIDEO: CLINICAL EXCELLENCE & COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS: HISTORY
National Health Center Week is August 4-10. It is a time when we share with our patients, partners, and policymakers the significant value and high-quality care health centers bring to the 31.5 million people they serve. It is also an opportunity to remind everyone, including staff and board members, of our roots and history that have laid the foundation of where the Community Health Center Movement is today. We encourage you to share this brief video which tells the story of clinical excellence at health centers.
2024 – April
Spotlight: “Did You Knows” and Quick Tips to Prevent Heart Attacks and Strokes
With a specific focus on improving blood pressure and cholesterol management, these tools share evidence-based strategies, prevention and treatment tips and links to videos, publications, national guidelines, infographics, and fact sheets. Educational resources are included for clinicians and care teams.
Available as downloadable PDF and PPT resources, the easily digestible content can be incorporated into professional development trainings and shared through a variety of digital communication platforms. PPT formats can be found here.
HIV PREVENTION
HIV Prevention PrEP Social Media Video
PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) can reduce a person’s chance of getting HIV from sex or injection drug use. When taken as prescribed, PrEP is highly effective for preventing HIV. Health centers are helping patients get access to PrEP as part of their HIV prevention strategies. But much education is needed to let patients know that it is available.
PrEP in Health Centers is a short social media video that health centers can customize with their logo and share broadly on their social media channels. Click here to download the video and instructions for customizing.
Learn more about PrEP or share additional PrEP educational resources with patients.
ADULT IMMUNIZATION
NACHC, supported by the National Adult Immunization and Influenza Summit, has published an update to its 2019 white paper The Strategies to Address Policy Barriers to Adult Immunizations in Federally Qualified Health Centers.
The white paper revisits the barriers and opportunities identified in the 2019 study. It analyzes how these factors have persisted or evolved over the past five years (2019-2024). The paper offers a fresh comparison of the current landscape, highlighting both enduring challenges and new opportunities that have emerged. Additionally, it explores new categories for consideration, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the current environment.
WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
Racial Justice Training Course Series
Groundwork: Racial Justice and Cultural Humility Training Center for Health Centers is a foundational, racial justice training for all health center roles. By engaging in this 8-session training, health center staff will have the tools to work towards racial equity and will:
Gain an understanding of the concepts of social identity, race, and ethnicityGain an understanding of systemic racism and how it affects the health of our patients Identify ways to recognize and address implicit bias and microaggressions in our interactions with patients and colleagues
2024 – February
A Quality Improvement Package for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH)
Developed by health centers, for health centers, Q4T can help anyone implementing or improving essential ASRH practices at health centers. It fosters an environment that is inclusive, high quality, and youth-friendly.
Q4T offers goals, strategies, implementation tips, and resources to guide care teams in their efforts to improve ASRH clinical services and youth-friendly practices
All content is based on current guidelines and recommendations, published evidence, and input from national experts, health center patients, staff, and administrators.
ADULT IMMUNIZATION
Ten Tips to Start an Ambassador Program
Vaccine Ambassadors are people who promote vaccine education, acceptance, and uptake in their local communities. They are trusted community members who can be health professionals, community health workers, health educators, social workers, and trained community members.
This resource offers ten tips for start a Vaccine Ambassador Program at a health center such as examining organizational readiness, creating workflows, defining vaccine scope of services and more.
The tips were developed from lessons learned in the Community Vaccine Ambassador Project, a partnership between NACHC and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and 13 community health centers throughout the U.S.
HEART DISEASE AND STROKE PREVENTION
Self-Measured Blood Pressure Monitoring (SMBP) Implementation Toolkit
Health centers are making significant strides in hypertension control. In fact, health centers achieve higher rates of hypertension control than the national average (60% vs. 50%)*, despite serving more more at-risk patients. Incorporating SMBP successfully into their care processes and workflows is one effective strategy that can contribute to patients and care teams monitoring of the patient’s blood pressure control.
The SMBP Implementation Toolkit is designed to help organizations successfully implement SMBP. The toolkit can help health centers:
· Determine their goals and priority populations
· Align their SMBP patient training approach to their practice environment
· Consider SMBP tasks by staff roles
· Learn key features and functionalities to consider when choosing a SMBP
data management software/technology partner, and
· Design a protocol for implementing SMBP.
*Source: Community Health Center Chartbook 2023
NATIONAL HEALTH OBSERVANCES
2024 Health Center Calendar Toolkit
Looking for new social media content and graphics to increase awareness of the health issues that may impact your patient’s lives, highlight and acknowledge health center staff or the impact your health center is making in your community?
NACHC’s 2024 Health Center Calendar Toolkit is here to help with sample social media graphics and customizable messages. Current content is available through March. More content for April-December health observances coming soon.
2023 – December
NEW ANIMATED SERIES HELPS HEALTH CENTERS IMPROVE ADULT IMMUNIZATION VACCINE PRACTICES
Looking to close immunization gaps and improve overall vaccination practice, procedures, and patient outcomes?
Check out NACHC’s micro-learning series, Lining Up the Shot: 4 Standards for Adult Immunization. These five short animated videos guide immunization teams through each of the four Standards for Adult Immunization Practice as part of a full immunization plan-of-action.
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
Behavioral Health Peer Group Toolkit
This toolkit offers Primary Care Associations (PCAs) several resources to help convene health center peers working on behavioral health, integrated behavioral health, or substance use disorder treatment teams. The toolkit offers templates for peer group meeting agendas, a charter, annual goals, and discussion topics. Each resource can be customized for PCA’s capacity and health center’s needs.
CLINICAL WORKFORCE
Clinical Workforce Wellness Toolkit
Drawing on the principles of trauma-informed care, this toolkit helps health center staff better regulate their nervous systems and resist the real threats of moral injury and burnout. Toolkit resources include sample workflow changes, emails, meeting agendas, an assessment tool, and brief individual and team exercises.
HEART DISEASE AND STROKE PREVENTION
Two new short provider education videos are now available to assist care teams working with patients at high risk for a cardiovascular event.
Making SMBP Work for your Patients: Tips for Health Centers
Features Kyle Fay, DNP, of The Family Practice & Counseling Network in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who discusses how the health center has successfully integrated self-measured blood pressure (SMBP) programs into their practice. The video helps clinicians think through solutions, best practices, and talking points for a discussion about SMBP with patients.
Treating Patients with Statins: Tips from a Clinician to Clinicians
Johan Torres, MD, of Miami Beach Health Center in Miami, Florida provides in-depth advice on how clinicians can best coach their patients to support optimal statin use. This video is for a clinician audience to learn best practices and insights on how to initiate statin prescribing, support adherence, and dispel common misconceptions from patients.
INFORMATICS
Using Occupational Data for Health Action Guide
The Using Occupational Data for Health Action Guide introduces health centers to eight steps they can take to build structured forms and fields to capture coded occupational data for health (ODH) in their electronic health record (EHR) system. Capturing patients’ ODH can help care teams offer more personalized care and create policies and procedures that promote safer work processes and reduce or prevent patient’s exposure to many work-related risks.