HEALTHY HAMILTON INITIATIVE
Keeping Patients Healthy KETTERING HEALTH NETWORK’S PROGRAM IS REDUCING VISITS TO THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT. By Eric Spangler
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ort Hamilton Hospital is ready to expand its Healthy Hamilton Initiative to the community of Hamilton. The current Healthy Hamilton Initiative program has been providing employees of the City of Hamilton with biometric screenings and same-day primary care visits for four years, says Beth Blank, director of business development at Fort Hamilton Hospital. The Healthy Hamilton Initiative program has succeeded in reducing the number of visits to the emergency department—and the expensive costs associated with emergency medicine—while increasing the number of visits to primary care physicians, she says. And that’s exactly the outcome for which the Healthy Hamilton Initiative was designed. By encouraging people to choose and then visit a primary care physician, health issues can be diagnosed and treated before those same health issues cause a problem that necessitates a trip to the emergency room. The biometric screening—which provides a clinical assessment of key health measures that enables doctors and health professionals to diagnose high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease or determine whether a patient has an increased risk for these conditions—is one of the keys to the health and well-being of 12
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The new Hamilton Health Center on Main opened in April. City of Hamilton employees. “We’re catching it on the front end rather than the back end before it’s too late,” Blank says. “It’s really keeping [patients] healthy.” As part of the Healthy Hamilton Initiative, Blank says its health professionals are also conducting vascular screenings. “If they have an irregular heart rate then we connect them with a cardiologist.” The hospital is now going to expand the Healthy Hamilton Initiative to the entire Hamilton community. “Our mission is to serve the people and the community, so we thought the best way to serve it is to be
proactive with their health care and just educating the community about all of the resources that are available through Fort Hamilton Hospital,” she says. One of the newest resources available to Hamilton residents will be Fort Hamilton Hospital’s Hamilton on Main building. The recently opened $6 million, 16,000-squarefoot facility has 24 exam rooms along with imaging and lab services. The new building provides office space for up to seven primary care providers, as well as specialists that will rotate through. That will allow Fort Hamilton Hospital to