Our Story

 

The story of CHV actually begins with the development of the Muskegon Community Health Project under the terms of a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The grant charged the Health Project with the task of developing a strategy to sustain the program after the grant expired. By 2001, he Board of Directors for the Health Project embraced a bold plan to create a separate for-profit entity, Community Health Ventures, Inc. that would be authorized to market the products and services of the Health Project to other communities across the nation. These products and services ranged from software sales to consulting services. Along the way, CHV also developed the skills necessary to educate policy makers on the need to finance community-based health programs. Assisting communities in the development of public policy became yet another of the services CHV provides to its clients.

Community-to Communty Consultants

CHV’s first successes in the consulting business were all related to helping other communities develop what are generally known as Three-Share health coverage programs. Through small contracts with communities, CHV assisted in mentoring several communities in the development of their own programs. As with most successes, there have been many imitators of the Muskegon Model for Three-Share programs. To distinguish Muskegon from those that do not have core community ownership, CHV has subsequently re-branded the Muskegon Model as a Multi-Share program. The growing interest in this model has resulted in national legislation under consideration in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U. S. Senate to develop community pilot programs based on the multi-share model.

Community Software Innovators

Following with the success of assisting other communities with health coverage model, CHV entered in the business of developing software solutions for community collaborative initiatives. Based on years of experience in Muskegon, CHV recognized the need to provide an Internet-based tool that could facilitate collaborative case management of at-risk populations. The first venture in this new direction was through a community partnership with a juvenile offender collaborative. The result of this partnership was the development of SHOnet, a successful web-based software application that allowed all collaborative participants to case manage the juvenile offender population. Immediately after the success of SHOnet, MCHP and CHV began working on a software product to expand the community case management capability of a program responsible for the health needs of Muskegon’s indigent population. The software, i-Net was developed through a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce and based on the architecture of SHOnet to enhance the ability of sharing information within the framework of a community collaborative. The old silo barriers were being removed and community partners could share medical information. The i-Net software incorporated case management tools, medical history, and a unique integration of claims data. Now physicians from one health system can see what medications were prescribed at a second health system. The i-Net software has enabled Muskegon’s community based health plan, Access Health, to cut costs significantly, internally manage its own claims payment process, and help physicians case manage and improve the health outcomes of its members.

On the experience of both the SHOnet and i-Net software applications, CHV has also developed an enhanced case management program for the community’s juvenile offenders who have been in long-term residential placement and who are now re-entering the community. CHV is also in the process of developing a similar program for a Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative (MPRI) pilot program in Muskegon County. These programs enable collaborative partnerships to collectively case mange the treatment services of re-entry prisoners and juvenile offenders.

Health Policy Advisors

Over the course of the past decade, the principals of CHV have been called up to testify before State Legislators and the U.S. Congress. CHV has provided assistance to several states in their efforts to pass legislation that enables to development of community-based health plans like Muskegon’s Multi-Share model. CHV has assisted the State of Michigan with the development of pilot programs to replicate the SHOnet program in other counties. CHV has worked with the Congress in the development of national legislation to replicate the Multi-Share community health plans. For more information on this see the Communities Building Access Act.

If the Past is Prologue

CHV’s brief history already suggests that the future will continue to build on the experiences drawn from successful community collaborative programs directed at improving access and health status for at-risk populations. CHV’s success in turn provides a revenue source back to its non-profit parent company, the Muskegon Community Health Project. The continued success of CHV will be defined by ability of the Health Project in meeting the challenge of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to sustain itself beyond the period of the grant. That period was now over six years ago and CHV has been a vital part of the Health Project success to date.