Project Summary
Refugees come to the United States for resettlement and begin their new life away from conflict. Ohio has systems in place to help them integrate and succeed in their new jobs, homes, and schools. Health care is an obvious critical need for new arrivals but too often they become part of a growing health disparity in our country. Confusion on all sides—the healthcare providers, the refugee patient, and the insurance companies—sustains an ineffective model of care that costs more and is less efficient. In the Tier I phase of our project, we gathered together for the purpose of bringing patient-centeredness to our refugee patients’ health needs. By the end of Tier I we were able to recruit refugee patient representatives to the group and now look forward to our Tier II project plan together. This group will now develop further recruitment and communication strategies to ensure more refugee patient participation, more healthcare provider education, and more insurance company connections to facilitate improved healthcare access and delivery. During Tier I we hosted various meetings and focus groups that captured themes of health topics people were interested in further developing. We will bring this list of comparative effectiveness research ideas to refugee patient representatives to gain insight into the direction appropriate for further development. Based on the topics triaged as high priority, we will continue to reach out to those stakeholders in the community needed to help facilitate further momentum for future research.