EmblemHealth Neighborhood Care: The Power of Members’ Own Words
Individual experiences shape tailored health and wellness services.
Nothing speaks to the impact EmblemHealth Neighborhood Care has on the communities it serves more than the firsthand accounts of those it has personally helped. EmblemHealth CEO Karen Ignagni was reminded of this when talking to two regular visitors to Neighborhood Care’s East New York location — Abra Parker and Lavada Singleton-Washington. Their words were so compelling that Ignagni asked Neighborhood Care AVP Nazneen Rahman to help capture their stories on video and share them broadly online and through social media.
EmblemHealth Neighborhood Care is the community health and wellness arm of EmblemHealth’s mission to create healthier futures, where members, and community residents alike, are able to help shape services and programming to reflect their own needs and experiences. Through this collaborative loop, Neighborhood Care can respond to the specific needs of individuals at its 15 community-based locations.
Ignagni described the videos of Parker and Singleton-Washington as demonstrating “what our Neighborhood Care teams bring to the communities they serve.” She added, “Our team members address the social barriers that keep people out of the health care system, address disparities in care, and provide wellness services. The model is unique, and the focus is personal.”
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Member feedback is central to Neighborhood Care’s ability to meet its mission. “We designed our sites to be hospitality and service focused,” said Rahman. “Everything we do — our classes, our staffing — everything is related to that. Feedback is critical; it tells us if we’re doing it right.”
In offering a place where personal connections and community can be forged, Neighborhood Care also plays a crucial role in well-being, partly through its offerings of free exercise classes and healthy lifestyle seminars. “We’re impacting people on a personal level,” Rahman acknowledged. “People come to us to find what they’re looking for, and sometimes they don’t know what that is until they understand all we have to offer.”