The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, a 15-year old New Jersey nonprofit organization known for its healthcare “hotspotting” model, has named Kathleen Noonan its new CEO. She will lead the organization’s clinical and community engagement work in Camden, its statewide advocacy and its national partnerships and field-building work.
The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers is a citywide coalition that includes 31 hospitals, primary care providers, and community organizations working together to deliver better health care to vulnerable citizens.
Noonan was co-founder of PolicyLab, a research center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with more than 60 clinicians, faculty, and staff who use clinical research to solve real-world challenges to the health and well-being of vulnerable children and youth.
As co-director at PolicyLab, she helped codify the Camden Coalition’s patient engagement framework and create a manual so the approach could be broadly disseminated. PolicyLab and the Camden Coalition are currently collaborating on a fidelity tool to test adherence to the model.
The Camden Coalition was founded by family physician Jeffrey Brenner, M.D., in 2002 as a breakfast group for local healthcare providers, and it quickly became focused on identifying and engaging the community’s residents with the most complex health and social needs and creating new models of care to shift costs and improve outcomes. The organization now has more than 100 staff members and 31 member organizations from across Camden. In 2016 the Coalition launched the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs to share the learnings from its interventions and those of similar organizations across the country.
The Camden Coalition’s “hotspotting” model uses data to identify and engage patients with patterns of extreme healthcare utilization and poor healthcare outcomes, with the goal of identifying and addressing gaps in care, often the social determinants of health.
“What attracted me to the Camden Coalition was the chance to work in a coalition of local partners who seek to better understand and address the complex needs of the most vulnerable members of our communities and to share what we learn with organizations nationwide,” Noonan said in a prepared statement. “At PolicyLab, we looked for – and developed – evidence-based solutions to real health-policy problems. There’s a strong parallel to what the Camden Coalition has been doing for 15 years.”
