Sustaining The System

Strategy 1 - Use Data to Demonstrate Your Program’s Value
Put data that matters to potential funders and payers in front of them to demonstrate the need for your program and your impact
Strategies in Action:
  • When IMPACT DC’s directors present to funders, they use quantitative data that describes the need, emphasizing the City’s disproportionate asthma burden (10.3% of children aged 0-17 years in DC have asthma); and qualitative data that follows one child through the program to demonstrate the health and QOL improvements the program delivers.
  • ANWM visits corporations and describes the burden of asthma in terms that are relevant to employers. There are many children with severe asthma in the community and when they suffer acute attacks, their parents—the corporation’s employees—are more likely to miss work.
Strategy 2 - Be Visible: Funders Support What They Know
Publicize your program’s activities and results as broadly as possible
Strategies in Action:
  • ANWM once received an unsolicited $30,000 grant because its leaders always made time to speak publicly about the program’s results. The program manager regularly appears at local health fairs, community events, United Way meetings, etc. When a newly formed investors’ circle was looking to support a significant social issue through an organization with demonstrated results, ANWM was the obvious choice.
Strategy 3 - Make it Easy to Support Your Program
Identify discrete program elements and their costs so that funders and payers can support individual elements if they are not ready to support the program in its entirety
Strategies in Action:
  • After meeting with limited success in their attempts to sell their asthma program to payers in the Kansas City area, CMFHP established a model that allows it to sell pieces of its program to outside insurers (i.e., payers other than Family Health Partners). For example, plans can buy the disease management training component without the social worker support for high utilizers, or consulting services for help replicating CMFHP’s program.
Strategy 4 - Promote Institutional Change for Sustainability
Embed your asthma management program in your organization
Strategies in Action:
  • CHA built their Planned Care Program “not by creating new jobs, but by showing the staff [they] already had how to do their jobs better.” CHA redesigned their workflows and developed the resources and systems, such as an electronic registry, to make it easy for staff to deliver the quality of care the program was designed to achieve.