Officials work to ‘modernize’ plan to improve health of Mississippians
By Gwen Dilworth | Originally published by Mississippi Today
The Mississippi State Department of Health is updating its blueprint for improving healthcare and public health systems.
The new Comprehensive State Health Plan will establish priorities and strategies for enhancing access to care, addressing workforce and system challenges and supporting the sustainability of the state’s public health systems, said State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney at a Board of Health meeting Wednesday.
“Instead of just monitoring, we’re trying to shape the healthcare needs of the state and push resources to those gaps,” Edney said.
The state published its last health plan in 2023. This plan, designed as a regulatory document, focused on healthcare provider planning law, Edney said, but the new state health plan will expand its scope to analyze data and help the agency set priorities and plan its programs.
“The goal is not simply to produce another planning document,” agency officials wrote in a memo. “The goal is to develop an informed, actionable statewide framework grounded in current data and the real-world experiences of the people and organizations serving Mississippians.”
Premier Healthcare Solutions Inc., a Charlotte, N.C.-based healthcare consultant company, was awarded a 15-month contract worth roughly $567,000 in July to help the agency craft the plan, including executing a data-driven assessment of Mississippi’s health system, engaging stakeholders and drafting the final document.
The company has begun seeking feedback from stakeholders, hosting invitation-only town halls this week in Greenville, Hattiesburg and Jackson, and will hold meetings in future weeks in Southaven and Oxford.
Roughly 350 healthcare professionals have signed up for the events, and the company will conduct additional surveys and stakeholder interviews in coming months, said Laura Goodson, the health department’s chief of staff.
Efforts to craft the new plan are funded by the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, a five-year, $50 billion federal investment in rural healthcare. Mississippi received nearly $206 million as a part of the first year of the program. Gov. Tate Reeves’ office oversaw the development of Mississippi’s plan and made a statewide rural health assessment one of the state’s six main initiatives.
Mississippi consistently ranks at or near the bottom nationally in healthcare outcomes and access. Mississippi has the highest rate of premature death, or deaths that could be prevented with timely and effective healthcare, in the nation.
State health plans can help guide a state’s priorities for improving health outcomes, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, former Maryland health secretary and a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. Identifying measurable outcomes and delegating tasks to specific agencies or partners can strengthen the documents.
“It’s good to have actions that people are committed to taking, rather than just goals,” he said.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
