Waiting Room As a Literacy & Learning Environment (WALLE) EMELIN MARTINEZ • Program Manager • emm9016@nyp.org DODI MEYER, MD • Medical Director • ddm11@cumc.columbia.edu Mission and Goals
The Waiting Room As a Literacy & Learning Environment (WALLE) is an initiative of the NewYork-Presbyterian Ambulatory Care Network. WALLE aims to address the social determinants of health through a twofold approach: enhancing health literacy by providing targeted health education, and empowering patients to seek resource referrals to support their social needs. WALLE helps medically underserved patients who are predominantly from Washington Heights, Inwood, and the Bronx, most of whom are native Spanish speakers. Bilingual volunteers are trained in the tenets of health literacy, motivation interviewing skills, and the transtheoretical model.stheoretical Model. The goals of the program are to: • Provide approaches designed to improve quality of care, patient satisfaction, and health education.
• Support clinical staff by providing supplemental counseling and resources for patients. • Maximize provider-patient interactions and optimize time spent in the waiting room by engaging patients. WALLE staff members aim to achieve these goals by: • Linking patients with free/low-cost community resources. • Giving patients relevant health education and improving their health literacy. • Telling medical providers about patients’ needs as identified by their caregivers. • Supporting medical providers with health education. • Assisting patients with the completion of medical forms, as needed. • Recruiting interns to serve ACN patients (124 interns were recruited in 2019, an increase of nearly 50% from the previous year).
Key Accomplishments
In 2019, WALLE continued to work in collaboration with the Addressing the Needs of the Community through Holistic Organizational Relationships (ANCHOR) program and assisted with the administration of 15,841 SDOH screenings across various ACN sites to help identify patients who may have screened positive for food insecurity, housing stability/quality, transportation, and utilities. These screenings helped identify 4,955 low-risk and 1,511 high-risk patients, according to the criteria set in place by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation Grant. Six WALLE Navigators joined the team during the latter half of 2019 and worked in collaboration with Community Resource Coordinators by helping to initiate navigation services to patients who were classified as high-risk. One hundred and twenty-four WALLE interns from over 30 higher learning institutions were recruited and trained to serve in the outpatient clinical settings of the Ambulatory Care Network, where services have been expanded to the department of internal medicine and OB-GYN patients. WALLE interns collectively served nearly 20,000 hours in 2019.
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