A Bold Mission: Ending Health Inequalities in Indian Country
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By Indigenous pact
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Indigenous PACT is a Native American woman-owned business with a bold mission – to bring health equity to Indian Country in a single generation. We are a healthcare consulting firm focused on three goals: healthy citizens, sustainable economies and healing spaces. We work with tribal communities to understand their health care delivery needs, create a shared strategic action plan, and propose solutions.
Health disparities among American Indians remain at an all-time high. Native Americans have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality, diabetes, heart disease, poisoning, suicide, as well as pneumonia and influenza. Overall, Native Americans have a lower life expectancy than the American population of all races. In order to solve these problems, tribal health leaders need more tools.
Tribes have come to Native PACT for help to enable their citizens to establish new health programs to address the most pressing public health issues, for example, the opioid epidemic with opioid treatment programs, while untangling the different levels of state and federal healthcare laws and creating a system to tackle IHS billing.
An important tool that Indigenous PACT uses to help our partners is our expertise in financial forecasting. Tribes have a unique responsibility to make smart investments in health infrastructure projects to improve the well-being of the entire community. These investments require reliable financial forecasts for tribal leaders. It is important to assess the risk associated with building new programs or expanding existing operations. To help leaders make the best possible decisions for the community, we help assess historical revenue streams and develop new reliable revenue generation forecasts.
Imagine this scenario. A 20-year-old, 21,000 square foot health clinic had reached its capacity to serve the community. The health department needed to find a way to minimize external funding for the health clinic by creating a business plan that generates stable revenue to support a loan repayment plan for a new building. Historical third-party revenue and billing data was scattered across many manual processes, making it difficult to compile supporting revenue forecasts.
In partnership with the Tribal Planning Department, Indigenous PACT created a comprehensive financial forecast and feasibility study for a new 50,000 square foot $25 million health center. Strategies used to create this forecast included an extensive review of historical records, developing historical revenues for seven service lines, creating three revenue forecast scenarios to break even, and assessing the growth of expanded patient population and services. Indigenous PACT was able to provide this client with the financial forecast, loan repayment plan, service population modeling, key performance indicators, and enrollment impact analysis. insurance of tribal members. The tribe was able to use all of this data to analyze the need for a new tribal health clinic and make a decision they trusted.
To learn more, visit nativepact.com.
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