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Intro: Riverside Healthcare puts the health and wellness information you need well within reach.

Liz Unruh (Host): Hello, listeners, and thanks for tuning into the Well Within Reach podcast, brought to you by Riverside Healthcare. I'm your host, Liz Unruh. And joining me today is Riverside President and CEO Phil Kambic. And today, we're going to be talking about the investment Riverside has made in our community and the Community Health Needs Assessment.

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Host: Thanks for joining us today, Phil.

Phillip Kambic: Sure, absolutely. I'd love to.

Host: Yeah. So, this is your second time on our podcast here in the last couple of months, can you tell us a little bit about yourself for those who might have missed your first episode?

Phillip Kambic: Sure. I'm Phil Kambic. I'm president, CEO here at Riverside. I have been CEO for about 20 years, been at Riverside my whole career, and was actually born and raised in the community. So, I am pretty familiar with the area and the surrounding areas.

Host: Yeah. And that's great. It really jumps into the importance of our first question. What is the Community Health needs assessment and why is it so important?

Phillip Kambic: The Community Health Needs Assessment is an assessment that a group of organizations do every three years. It was originally mandated through the Affordable Care Act, but it really is a very good process and we've been doing it for quite some time now, but it really takes a look at a lot of different factors and indicators across the whole spectrum of social service and healthcare. Then, we try to consolidate that into strategic priorities that we'll work on for the next three years.

Host: Yeah, I think that's a really great explanation, because I know it can seem really big and overwhelming, but like to be able to find those priorities that are important for our community. Can you talk about how Riverside collaborates with those community partners, like the health department, St. Mary's Hospital and other representatives from within the service area to come up with this assessment and the action items?

Phillip Kambic: Sure. There is a fee to do this. Nothing in life is free. And so, Riverside, St. Mary's and the Health Department all pay one third of the overall fee to complete the health needs assessment. There's an outside agency that we use that does this kind of across the country. So, they have their methodology, they know what data they wanna collect, and they know what questions to ask. And then, we invite a lot of other partners into this. So everybody from the YMCA, Harbor House, Salvation Army, just a lot of those other agencies that we feel have a lot of input and provide a lot of care outside of the hospital setting to people within this community. So, we just try to get a really broad spectrum of folks to come together to give their input into this.

Host: Yeah. So, we just entered into a new era. We just completed the community needs assessment for the next three years. Can you talk about what the main priorities were that were identified as the biggest health needs within our community?

Phillip Kambic: Sure. There were three main priorities, and I would bet many of these priorities are going to be the same across the country. The first one being chronic disease and chronic disease for chronic heart disease, chronic cancer care, stroke, respiratory illness. You've heard words like CHF, chronic heart failure; COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. So chronic disease, as we have an aging population, it's more important than ever to try to stay up on those things, and how do we help keep people out of the hospital. So, that was the first priority. Second priority is behavioral health. And it seems like really ever since COVID, behavioral health has just exploded as really a major issue, not only in Kankakee and Kankakee County, but across the country. And so, lots of needs around behavioral health, behavioral health education, and prevention.

And then, the third one is social determinants of health. So, somewhat of a new term in the past few years here. But really, we're very fortunate. We go home at night and we go to our refrigerator and we can pull out food from our refrigerator and have a nice dinner or maybe stop by a restaurant. There's a lot of people that have food insecurities that don't have enough to eat. And this assessment really helped identify really the extent of that problem. And it is a major problem within our area as well as housing and transportation, those sorts of things.

Host: Yeah. So, we take this information and then organizations are able to use it. So, how is Riverside using the information that's gathered from this community health needs assessment to address the issues?

Phillip Kambic: Yeah, absolutely. So if you take chronic disease as an example. Riverside has opened up a number of specialty clinics, a heart failure clinic, that we have staffed with NPs, with physician oversight to help those patients understand, "Here are things you need to look for. Here are our practices that can help you keep you out of the hospital." We have created a lot of these specialty clinics for patients.

We have a whole department now called our population health department. And that population health department has identified these are folks who have come to Riverside frequently and how do we help keep them healthy. And so, we set up routine phone calls with them. We set up things to monitor what medications they're on, to monitor their weight, et cetera. So, we have done a lot with the chronic disease. Always more to do, but those are a few of the things we've done.

Behavioral health has just been a huge issue in our community and Riverside has kind of stepped up again. We have our Pathways Program over at the atrium. We've doubled the space. We just opened up a new ABA therapy program, applied behavioral analytics. So, we're doing a lot on that behavioral health side. We have a very big initiative we're working with the state on to get approved right now. We're really revamping our whole inpatient units, which is going to be a huge investment, but it will then provide private rooms for most of our behavioral health patients as well. So, we're doing a lot in the behavioral health space.

Then, finally, with social determinants of health, food insecurities is something that we've really adopted. We have our own food pantry over at East Court. We've actually started small food pantries at a number of our other sites, down in Watseka, even in Manteno, out in Coal City to help those patients who come in for care to make sure they have healthy food options and choices. And we fund a lot of that through the hospital and through employee donations.

Host: Yeah, I think those are really important things. I know especially we talk a lot about the food insecurity being a major issue. I know, the East Court clinic is one of the very few and far in between actual physical food pantry locations left in town. A lot of them are more mobile type situations. So, it's nice to see that we've made that investment in the community.

Phillip Kambic: We've partnered with Northern Illinois Food Pantry. And I think we are their only clinic-based food pantry in all of Northern Illinois. So again, really have tried to help support our community.

Host: Yeah, I think that's really big. And we're going to take a quick break to talk about primary care.

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And we're back. So, we're going to talk a little bit about the 2024 Community Benefit Report that Riverside puts together. So in 2024, Riverside contributed over $68.7 million in community benefits, which included over $48 million in subsidized health services. Can you share some examples of where like this investment directly impacted patient care and community health?

Phillip Kambic: Sure, absolutely. And so, I'm going to start with the first number. You said the $68 million. If I'm a lay person, I hear that, I'm like, no way. That's just crazy. Nobody can give up that much money or put that much. This is truly at cost, $68 million at cost. Riverside is a not-for-profit community hospital. And so, what we do is there's some services where we're going to make money. There's some services where we're not. And so when we don't, we give those services away for free.

A great example is our Pembroke facility. That is really a charity care clinic out in Pembroke Township. Pembroke is one of the poorest communities in the state of Illinois. They would not have access to healthcare. Many folks out there don't have access to transportation. They don't have access to come to the hospital. So, we have a fully staffed clinic out there with nurse practitioners and physicians to see those patients. That's one example. Ambulance service is very expensive to run. It is not money making. We lose money on ambulance. But if we didn't provide ambulance to many of the rural areas of our communities, people would not be able to get to the hospital and they literally would die in their beds at night. Now, they can pick up a phone, they can call 911 and a Riverside ambulance shows up at their door to bring them to the hospital. So, there's many of those subsidized services that we provide, that if we were a for-profit, we wouldn't.

OB is another great example. OB is not a money-maker in healthcare. The state doesn't pay that well. The feds don't pay that well. And so, some organizations are dropping OB. For Riverside, that is key to our community. And so, we continue to provide OB services and OB coverage.

Host: Yeah, I know that's big. I appreciated being able to have my children close to home and not have to drive 30 plus minutes to the next hospital. I think it's really great to be close to where you live. I know one of the points of access that we list in our community benefit report is language assistance. We've invested over $136,000 in these types of services. Are there some type of real world outcomes from our ability to enhance the language access?

Phillip Kambic: Oh, absolutely. You know, if you look at our county demographics, the Hispanic population continues to grow. I think it's up to 16-17% of the county. Now, many of those folks don't speak English. If you come into our ER and you don't speak English and the doctors don't speak Spanish, that's a real problem of how do we understand what's actually going on with these patients.

So, we have language line, we have interpreters. We've had a really big initiative on trying to reach out to that Spanish-speaking community. We actually will pay our staff to get certified in Spanish. And then, we pay them extra to be interpreters for us. So, there's lots of that work going on with the Spanish-speaking population.

We've converted our website into Spanish as well, and we're rolling out myChart in Spanish also. So, lots of big initiatives, but we have this technology where really almost any language on the planet. If you speak Polish, if you speak Lithuanian, we can use this technology to make sure that we're understanding what that languages that that patient speaks.

Host: I think that's great, and I know that it does seem to be a barrier to healthcare, is they're worried that they're not going to be understood or listened to, but having language line is great in those type of clinical settings.

Phillip Kambic: You know, it's interesting. I'll divert to one other comment. Literally, this happened to me about two months ago, but I'm downstairs in the main lobby and this nice couple came up to me and they're speaking to me in Spanish. I don't know Spanish. And it's like, okay, so I'm trying to direct them to signage. And all the signage is in English. Well, we're working on that and we're converting more to Spanish, but I took them over to the main desk and that's when they were able to pick up a phone and use our language line to get the help that they need, but it should be easier. And these people were just trying to find their doctor's office.

Host: Yeah, I think that's great that we're making the investment in making it accessible, not only once you're in the clinic to be understood, but to get to the clinic is really huge. So, not only is Riverside investing in the community, but we're also investing in our employees. Can you talk about the importance of the investment in our staff to continue education and training?

Phillip Kambic: I tell everybody education is the great equalizer. What I mean by that is that whatever background you come from, whether you're rich, whether you're poor, if you get your education and you get your certifications, you can do anything you want in this world.

I'm a great example. I grew up in a very humble, humble background. But I was fortunate to get scholarships and to get tuition reimbursement, those sorts of things, and went on and got my bachelor's degree, got my master's degree and so forth. So, i'm a big believer in how do we help our employees continue their education. So, we have all sorts of scholarships through our foundation, that community folks have funded. But then, we also have a lot of tuition reimbursement and we reimburse for certain certifications for ongoing education. So, we really value education and put our money where our mouth is to help our staff go on and achieve more.

Host: I think that's great. And, you know, looking ahead, when we have those high thinkers and those people who have gone and gotten certifications or Dr. Zakaria, who did his fellowship and can now work with the biplane here in town. We've made those investments to keep people closer to home with their care where their loved ones are and their support systems are.

So looking ahead, based on the community health needs assessment and you know, our community needs, what are you most optimistic about in Riverside's future community impact? Are there some kind of like upcoming goals that you'd like to share with us?

Phillip Kambic: One of the, one of the big ones, and I alluded to it, we're going to invest about $30 million in our behavioral, inpatient behavioral health unit. it is going to be a state-of-the-art facility where we can help more people and we can help more people more comfortably in private rooms. And we do a great job now, but we'll be able to do a even better job.

This ABA therapy and behavioral health, we just started rolling that out. That is for autistic children. There is really no services for these poor kids anywhere in our local community. You have to go up to the South suburbs or down to Champaign. So, very excited about trying to help more people with that.

The population health program that I mentioned too earlier, population health is partnered with our home care, has partnered with our ambulance to do integrated mobile health. We have one person, an ambulance guy person who ends up going to people's homes free of charge, to check on them to make sure that they're taking their meds, to do a kind of an environmental scan to make sure they don't have tripping hazards, all those sorts of things.

So as we get more and more into population health, just being able to keep some of our seniors and some of our folks who have chronic conditions healthy, just very excited about that.

Host: Those are very exciting things. And great to see that we're, you know, forward-thinking and looking ahead for how we can best serve the community. Well, thank you, Phil, so much for joining us today. And thank you listeners for tuning into the Well Within Reach podcast brought to you by Riverside Healthcare. To learn more about the investment Riverside has made in the Kankakee and surrounding communities, visit riversidehealthcare.org.