Unidos: Linking Individuals to Social Determinant and Community Health Services

Latinos in Arizona, who are predominantly of Mexican-origin, are disproportionately affected by chronic disease and social conditions that contribute to health disparities. Important social determinants of health (SDH)--conditions where people live, work, and play--include barriers to healthy food, physical activity, poverty, discrimination, and housing instability as well as insufficient access to quality and culturally-responsive services. Such factors are increasingly recognized within primary care and population health as equal drivers of chronic disease and clinical indicators. Latino health is complex with not only disproportionate barriers, but also health advantages compared to other groups.

Recently, federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) have begun to incorporate assessments of their clients' SDH. With their foci on high-level clinical care for underserved populations, however, the capacity of these entities to respond to social and community needs is markedly limited. Community-clinical linkage (CCL) models provide opportunities for FQHCs to work collaboratively with other entities to leverage extant community resources and capacities. County health departments are uniquely positioned to collaborate with primary care partners and other community agencies to address social determinants.

Existing evidence of the effectiveness of CCLs in improving the health status of Latinos and their antecedent social conditions is scarce. The AzPRC will address this gap by executing a practice-based public health research study within four underserved, predominantly Mexican-origin communities. Our core research project, Unidos: Linking Individuals' to Social Determinant and Community Health Services, will result in a model CCL intervention to reduce chronic disease risk among Latinos in Arizona. Further, the investigators expect this intervention model to be applicable in other regions and populations. To execute this research, the AzPRC will implement the intervention in partnership with county health departments and FQHCs. In Unidos the county/community-based CHWs will: 1) support and connect participants to health promotion resources; 2) provide individual and group-based support guided by a novel framework for understanding Latino's health advantages, the sociocultural resiliency model; and, 3) leverage community resources to help individuals address SDH-related needs. The aims of this research study are to

1. Implement and evaluate Unidos, a community-delivered, SDH-focused CHW intervention. The core elements of the evaluation will include community-responsive, mixed methodologies. Our hypothesis is that the Unidos intervention will reduce overall chronic disease risk, defined from the biological component from the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7. A rigorous quasi-experimental design will be employed to determine Unidos' effect from electronic health records extracted 12 months after enrollment, with comparisons of clients participating vs not participating in the 6-month intervention. Exploratory analyses of cost effectiveness will be executed to further inform the scaling and sustainability of the intervention within local and county health department infrastructures.
2. To test the sociocultural resilience model of Latino health advantages through the collection and analysis of longitudinal data that includes rich markers of reported health status, health behaviors, and psychosocial factors. The investigators have two hypotheses: a) the CHW-led, culturally embedded, intervention will lead to enhanced social support, social networks, health behaviors, quality of life and general health; and b) social support and social networks will mediate improvements in reported health observed over 6 months.
3. A secondary aim is to examine whether our novel, CHW-administered assessments, contribute to the understanding of Latino health risk and advantages beyond a self-administered SDH tool that recently became integrated in the electronic health record (EHR) of two of our four clinical partners. The partners' use of this self-administered SDH tool is part of a national effort where select FQHCs across the country are testing whether it has utility for understanding and better addressing the population health needs of the patients they serve.