May 2016, Managed Care
Sabra Matovsky met her at a town hall meeting for low-income residents in Riverside, California. The 60-year-old woman was depressed. She was caring for her mentally ill adult son and had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. Her primary care doctor had dutifully loaded her up with educational material—brochures, pamphlets, websites, the name of a support group. But the woman couldn’t deal with it.
“She was overwhelmed. Her health care really took a back seat to dealing with her son’s issues,” says Matovsky, the executive vice president of Integrated Health Partners, a consortium of 11 federally qualified health centers caring for more than 500,000 Medi-Cal patients in San Diego and Riverside counties (Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program).