Hawaii County Beacon Community - Improving health through health technology
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KAREN PELLEGRIN: The Hawai'i County Beacon Community is
a very agricultural-based, rural community.
MIKE SAYAMA: There's about 175,000 people.
We'll never have enough physicians
to take care of the population.
We can hire care coordinators in these different communities,
hook them up with laptops, and have them
go out in the field and provide access to care,
where the people are living, and have that information
flow back to the personal physician in the context
of a Patient-Centered Medical Home.
PELLEGRIN: We can do things like Tele-Health,
connecting care providers with patients in more remote areas,
keeping patients out of the hospital, out of the E.R.
SAYAMA: A third of the people have chronic disease,
but they spend 2/3 of the medical expense.
So we've got to impact that.
PELLEGRIN: If people are monitoring their own care better,
monitoring their blood glucose levels,
monitoring their medication, and feeding that
back into the system,
the care providers can do a better job intervening early.
SAYAMA: The cost of care is really the most fundamental issue.
We have to shift the idea of health care
from treating disease to taking care of health --
to really enable responsibility on everybody's part.
PELLEGRIN: there's a notion that we can work together
to improve the care for all of us.
