Examining Community Health Workers' Role and the Organizational Factors That Drive Provider Satisfaction

Introduction: The Community Health Worker (CHW) role is evolving and becoming more integral to community-based interventions that aim to lower cost and improve patient care and health, by assisting providers through coordinating referrals, and providing an additional “warm touch” for patients. Through the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s (CMMI) Health Care Innovation Awards (HCIA), 16 of the 24 Community Resource Planning, Prevention, and Monitoring HCIA awardees implemented an innovation that involved a CHW or CHW like component. This study aims to examine the relationship between the CHWs’ role, and provider satisfaction with working with those CHWs. We will investigate both the organizational factors, such as trainings provided, CHW required credentials, and individual provider characteristics, such as age, primary medical specialty that drive provider’s satisfaction with CHWs.

Methods:  This study will use multilevel modeling to explore the complex relationships between factors associated with CHWs and provider’s satisfaction with CHWs in the innovation.  The organizational factors associated with CHWs that will be included in the model are awardee requirements for CHWs’ role, training, and frequency of touch with the target population. The data source for the organizational factors is qualitative data from the quarterly progress and Lewin reports from HCIA funded awardees. The data source for the provider level characteristics is a provider survey (n=359) conducted with 8 innovations involving CHWs or CHW like individuals.

Results:  We will examine how factors associated with CHWs and characteristics of providers contribute to provider satisfaction.   We hypothesize that innovations that utilize CHWs with a higher level of training and more patient engagement will drive a higher level of satisfaction from providers that work with CHWs.  Likewise, we anticipate that providers who are younger and have experience with innovation initiatives and working in a care team will be more open to working with CHWs; thus, more satisfied with the overall innovation.

Conclusions:  The study will provide an in-depth understanding of the complex relationships across the awardees involving CHWs or CHW like components and how common characteristics relate to provider satisfaction of the innovation. The findings will support the idea that CHWs can plan an important role as part of the patient care team, can help guide health care efforts to success by providing a “warm touch,” could help promote better health in a targeted community.  The factors associated with CHWs in successful HCIA innovations can assist organizations in refining job postings and recruiting potential staff.