2017 FL-DSSG Summer Internship

The Mayo Clinic is a large hospital group that serves over a million individuals from across the nation and 137 countries worldwide. In 1986, Mayo Clinic opened its doors in Jacksonville and has a 300-bed hospital and over 40 medical and surgical specialties. The Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, launched Wellness Rx in response to the 2016 Community Health Needs Assessment report regarding health disparities in the community. The first phase of the Wellness Rx program is a collaboration with New Town Success Zone and focuses on the New Town neighborhood adjacent to the Edward Waters College in Duval County. This community is one neighborhood identified by the Florida Department of Health-Duval County as Health Zone 1, a community at risk for the challenged health indicators.

The program consists of health and wellness education and screening. The initiative faces two wicked problems. First, there are no community level data available to help with identification and selection of at-risk neighborhoods to ensure the most optimal use of health resources. Second, the program currently is working in an area that already receives services from many other agencies and may be experiencing saturation of services. The goal of the 2017 DSSG project is to assist the Wellness Rx, and similar organizations in the area, decide which specific neighborhoods in Duval and St. Johns County would serve as areas for focused health resources in future initiatives. Using Census Data provided by the Florida Department of Health, the DSSG program will create “hot spot” maps that can be used to determine areas that are of highest need for resources. The team will be looking at targeted health outcomes (diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, along with other health risk factors (e.g., demographic information, environmental factors) to create a health risk index score by Census Tract. With this project, we will be creating a neighborhood profile that highlights areas in Duval and St. Johns County that are in most need of health services. The resulting process can be used by organizations around Jacksonville to provide an empirical way to determine where to focus their healthcare resources to have the greatest impact on health outcomes. By targeting high risk health neighborhoods, health care organizations can achieve their greatest impact and efficient use of resources.

Changing Homelessness is a homeless coalition organization that addresses homeless issues within the Northeast Florida region. The mission of Changing Homelessness is to guide the community effort in preventing and ending homelessness by providing leadership, advocacy, support, standards, and funding. Their wicked problem is to end Chronic Street Homelessness in Jacksonville, FL. In order to achieve this goal, the coalition has committed to use data to reach effective and functional zero. Functional zero occurs when communities have a greater outflow of homeless individuals (housing) than inflow (households becoming homeless) on a monthly basis. As part of the 2017 DSSG program, data from three major shelters (City Rescue Mission, Sulzbacher Center, and Salvation Army) will be analyzed to generate a profile of who is experiencing chronic homelessness and how to most effectively intervene on their behalf. Achieving functional zero is vital for the Jacksonville community from both humanitarian and economic perspectives. The cost to the community of ignoring one long-time unsheltered person is $20,000 to $30,000 per year, while the cost to house a homeless person ranges from $6,000 to $12,000 per year. Having a better profile of those who are chronically homeless as compared to those who are temporarily homeless could help social service agencies use their limited resources more responsibly to end chronic homelessness in Jacksonville, FL. Better use and coordination of resources to address those who are chronically homeless will decrease the vulnerability of those that are homeless and better provide them with needed services for long term care.