GHP May 2017

GHP / May 2017 17 Company: Louisville Urban League Name: Lyndon Pryor Email: [email protected] Web Address: www.lul.org Address: 1535 W Broadway, Louisville, KY 40203 Telephone: 502-585-4622 It Starts Here g for individuals, families, and organizations throughout our city. The program supports the League’s goals of ensuring equity and enabling people to take control of their own destiny. The work of our Health Education and Policy is managed by program manager, Lyndon Pryor who oversees all of the work of our two full-time community health workers Health Navigators, Ritu Rowland and Lee’Vaughn Morris, and our five community outreach workers who recruit for the Zones 100 program. As we move forward with our community health programs stability is the largest challenge we face. Programs like ours are not yet seen as vital to the entire health network. However we believe that is changing. There is now a state wide Association of community health workers that is advocating for policy changes that would enhance the work we do. For instance, in some states such as Washington and New York, there are already policies on the books that allow for reimbursement of targeted health services through Medicaid and Medicare. Such policy changes would help to expand the work we do by reducing the cost to organizations like ours. We hope would like to see similar policies come to Kentucky. Additionally we like to see more agencies work with us to really utilize our services. We know our community health workers not only save time for hospitals, clinics, and other service organizations, but we also save money and ultimately we help their patients and participants engage them in more productive ways. We believe that the use of community health workers in urban cities like Louisville can be a game changer and we are proud to be on the cutting edge of this work and excited to partner with other organizations around the city, state, and the nation.