Humboldt Park Health
Prioritizes Health Equity and Improves Care Access With MEDITECH Expanse
Healthcare equity is a pillar of a just and compassionate society, yet achieving it remains formidable due to systemic and societal factors. With the help of its MEDITECH Expanse EHR, Humboldt Park Health renewed its commitment to whole-person care, to serve the unique social, environmental, and medical needs of its community.
“We knew that caring for our patients had to include addressing the long-term stressors and socioeconomic challenges they faced every day,” said CEO José R. Sánchez. “To improve health outcomes, we needed our EHR to give us a clear picture of our community’s needs and challenges, so we could develop specific programs to address them in all of their complexities.”
Measuring community needs
Central to Humboldt Park Health’s efforts was its ability to collect accurate data on an ongoing basis. To measure patients’ complex needs, the organization began gathering social determinants of health data during patient screenings and entering it into MEDITECH’s Expanse EHR. This information was visible across the continuum, so all inpatient and outpatient care teams could stay up-to-date on how food security, housing, employment, and other factors could be affecting patient health.
The organization confirmed that obesity was a contributing health factor for 38% of patients and 18% were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes — a rate twice as high as the City of Chicago. Getting a complete picture of patient needs and quantifying improvements were essential for Humboldt Park Health to establish its outreach programs.
Employing population health tools
Data analytics allowed Humboldt Park Health to quantify community needs in three key areas: hypertension, substance use disorder, and diabetes. Clinicians used Expanse’s patient registries to identify and monitor comorbidities like high blood pressure and abnormal lipid profiles, giving leaders a comprehensive view of their patient populations and allowing providers to monitor disease progression.
“Using patient registries in our EHR has been a crucial method of monitoring the needs of specific patients, like those with diabetes,” said COO Daisy Rodriguez, MSN, MPH, BS, RN. “With tailored dashboards, we’ve been able to track critical metrics like hemoglobin and A1C levels — as well as stratify this data by race/ethnicity and primary language.”
Outreach programs for better health
As a safety net hospital, Humboldt Park Health relies on foundation funding and grants to help with outreach programs that address patients’ needs.
"Our EHR was essential for capturing immunization data and other information via the organization’s mobile units — fully equipped medical and dental vans that travel throughout the community bringing primary and dental care to low-income and homeless families,” said Rodriguez. “This unique feature, used primarily for pediatric patients, provides free care for children ages 3 to 21. These mobile units have made 5,000 patient visits during the past year."
Humboldt Park Health also maintains partnerships with several nonprofits to improve access to healthy foods and participates in Wellness West, a collaborative of 40+ organizations providing resources to residents facing health, socioeconomic, and environmental challenges.
Making a difference
Humboldt Park Health’s focus on health equity is yielding concrete results. By using patient registry tools in its Expanse EHR, along with MEDITECH’s Business and Clinical Analytics dashboards, leaders were able to examine groups of patients based on common risk factors.
“Knowing the highest rates of breast cancer nationwide occur in brown or black women, we sought to identify women in their community who were due for screening or follow-ups,” said Rodriguez. “We then used outreach strategies like mailings, text alerts, and health fairs to offer technologically advanced 3D screening, to improve early diagnosis rates and prompt interventions."
Following these targeted campaigns, Humboldt Park Health measured a 40% increase in mammograms.
Humboldt Park Health became the first hospital in the Midwest to earn Healthcare Equity Certification from The Joint Commission in 2024 and opened its state-of-the-art wellness center at the beginning of 2025. The Wellness Center is the next step toward addressing social determinants of health in the Humboldt Park community.