Public Health Forum Wednesday Precedes August Summit on Care

By JULIA WELLS

Call it a laboratory for learning about health care on
Martha\'s Vineyard. Or call it the Foundation for Island Health.

Either way you get the same thing: A young Island foundation aimed
at testing a patient-centered, self-funded community health system whose
cornerstones are prevention, education and state-of-the-art technology.

Now, two years after it was launched, the outlines for the
foundation have begun to take on a little more definition.

\"We have begun to distill what it is we are going to do, which
is initiate, test and evaluate new ways of delivering health care and
providing programs in health care and wellness,\" said Carole
Cohen, who is the chief operating officer for the foundation.

\"We\'re going to do it on a community basis, involving as
many institutions on the Island as we can. And we\'re not going to
operate programs. Once we are done with a project, we will pass it on to
another group or institution to operate the program,\" she added.

The foundation has a number of activities planned in the months
ahead, including a pilot project for an innovative community medical
information system on the web, a trial health care advocate program and
a summer symposium on Vineyard health care.

The symposium will also be sponsored by the Dukes County Health
Council and Healthy Communities Martha\'s Vineyard.

The agenda for the symposium will be set after two community forums
aimed at gathering public opinion; the first forum is planned this
Wednesday from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Martha\'s Vineyard Hebrew
Center. A repeat forum will be held the following Thursday at the same
time at the Howes House in West Tisbury.

The forums will be structured as back-to-back platforms for a wide
range of questions about health care on the Vineyard, but the responses
will be reserved for the August symposium. Panelists at the symposium
will include John Ferguson, the chairman of the board of trustees at the
Martha\'s Vineyard Hospital; Cynthia Mitchell, the new director of
the Island insurance program; Ilene Kline, an Island family
practitioner, and Donald Berwick, a nationally recognized physician who
founded a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving the quality of
medical care in the United States.

Ms. Cohen said the only topics that the forums will pointedly avoid
are the financial condition or management at the Island hospital.

\"We are hoping that Islanders will come and express their
concerns about their health care in an effort to find some
consensus,\" she said.

The foundation was established in August of 2000. The chief
executive officer is Dr. Charles Silberstein, a Vineyard psychiatrist.

Last year the foundation received a $50,000 start-up grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and launched an ambitious fund drive
aimed at raising $1.2 million.

Since then the foundation has made progress on a handful of projects
aimed at testing new health care systems. One is an electronic
outpatient database the foundation hopes to establish among Vineyard
doctors. The pilot project will include the development of an electronic
bulletin board; patients who volunteer to participate in the program
will have their medical information entered into the bulletin board. The
patient will have a user identification number, and the bulletin board
information will be available to the doctors of participating patients.

Initially the bulletin board will only be among the doctors who have
offices in the hospital, and Ms. Cohen said the hospital has agreed to
pay for the installation of T-1 lines in the doctors\' offices. She
said the plan calls for eventually expanding the network to include all
the Vineyard doctors and later even complementary health care
practitioners.

Also this summer the foundation plans to launch a pilot health care
advocate project. Under the project, a nurse at the Island hospital will
keep track of cases and act as an advocate for 10 to 20 patients with
chronic illnesses. At the end of six months, Ms. Cohen said, the
foundation will evaluate a number of factors, including whether the
patients are more comfortable with their care, whether their health has
improved, whether the doctors are more comfortable with the care they
are giving and whether the cost of care has been reduced.

Ms. Cohen said the foundation also plans to establish a community
institutional review board, made up of doctors and members of the
Vineyard community who are not members of the foundation. The purpose of
the board is to look at the foundation proposals and evaluate them.

\"We think we need that,\" she said.