City Health Works
Model & Strategy
City Health Works hires and professionally trains Local Health Coaches who operate in their own community, while serving as a bridge to clinics. They help their peers better manage their health and navigate the complicated healthcare system, and they partner with health systems and insurers to evaluate return on investment to build a case for financial sustainability. At the neighborhood level, City Health Works creates meaningful local jobs and ensures patients receive the right care at the right time.
City Health Works has a unique and powerful ability to work closely with patients, primary care teams, and social service providers. Working together allows them to achieve population health goals, reduce healthcare spending and create more resilient neighborhoods.
Since founding City Health Works in 2012, Manmeet Kaur has led its growth from a promising vision to an increasingly recognized example of how to bridge the gap between health and healthcare. Manmeet incubated City Health Works while pursuing an MBA at Columbia. Throughout the past 10 years, Manmeet has worked on efforts to create meaningful jobs and improve health for informal and low-wage workers in New York City, South Africa and India.
Before launching City Health Works, Manmeet was an advisor to the Earth Institute’s One Million Community Health Worker Campaign. Manmeet is a Third Millennium Human Rights Fellow and a GLG Social Impact Fellow. She was selected as the 2012 Alumni Social Innovator by the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School.
IMPACT
City Health Works currently serves more than 400 patients across two cities in New York – Harlem & Albany, influencing the quality of care in multiple healthcare systems and closing critical gaps in psychosocial care. They have served over 2,000 clients to date.
CHW ensures clients get the right care at the right place when they need it. For one out of every two patients, CHW escalated an uncovered medical case or medical issue to the clinic before it became a crisis.
In 2019, the results of two key studies validated CHW’s significant ROI:
1) A matched control trial conducted by NYU found that in the year after CHW coached patients with Diabetes and Hypertension, the average total cost of care per Medicaid patient was reduced by $8,525.
2) A randomized control trial conducted by Mt. Sinai found that patients with poorly controlled Asthma experienced 50% fewer Emergency Room visits at 12 months in comparison to usual medical care.
CHW has improved clinical measures of diabetes. 83% of CHW’s clients with diabetes experienced a drop in blood sugar.
City Health Works News
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New York Borrows a Health Care Idea From AfricaManmeet Kaur, the social entrepreneur who founded City Health Works four years ago, spent several years doing economic development and HIV prevention work in the…Oct 2017 -
Can Ordinary Citizens Help Fill Gaps in U.S. Health Care?In the midst of radical changes in health care policy, some U.S. providers are looking to an unlikely model: Sub-Saharan Africa, where ordinary citizens are…Oct 2016
