Peconic Bay Medical Center was among the hospitals represented in Hauppauge Friday at the launch of a website that’s part of a broad new initiative aimed at transforming the way Long Island’s health agencies serve the region.
“It’s exciting to be part of something that’s not being done anywhere else in the state,” said Samantha Vigliotta, PBMC’s director of donor relations and its liaison for the Long Island Health Collaborative initiative.
The LIHC partnership grew out of a series of meetings that included various health service entities, initially formed in February 2013 in response to enhanced state and federal government regulations requiring all health care providers, local health departments and community-based service organizations to work more closely together in their shared mission of serving the public’s health needs, according to a press release.
Howard Zucker, the state’s First Deputy Commissioner of Health, attended the ceremony to officially launch LIHC – pronounced “like” – and its website.
Zucker commended LIHC, a partnering of all of Long Island’s 24 hospitals, both Nassau and Suffolk County Health Departments, academic institutions and dozens of community-based organizations, for working in the spirit of the government’s push for inter-agency synergy.
“It’s a call to action to ask all the different stakeholders that are involved to collaborate with communities, but you are doing exactly what we are targeting: to look at the needs of the community and to look at how you could reduce disease and also to promote a healthy lifestyle. So you’re doing this very well,” Zucker said.
Vigliotta said the Riverhead Central School District’s October launch of its Project Fit initiative, aimed at getting students more active and monitoring their progress, is one example of such collaboration in Riverhead.
According to PBMC’s Community Service Plan, expansion of health services such as the new medical campus in Manorville that opened in September is another aspect of proactively addressing the increasing health needs of the local population, which it describes as having a “significantly higher percentage of elderly than the average of Suffolk County, Nassau County and New York State.”
Approximately 32 percent of people in PBMC’s service areas are over the age of 55, compared to the national average of 25 percent, according to 2011 U.S. Census data.
Suffolk County Health Commissioner James Tomarken called the LIHC website a centralized “portal” to user-friendly health services information and educational materials, including definitions of the chronic diseases that affect a full half of the region’s adult population.
Other speakers at LIHC’s launch were the organization’s director of communications, Janine Logan, Nassau County Health Commissioner Larry Eisenstein and Kevin Dahill, president and CEO of the Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council.
The speakers talked of a broad campaign being planned to promote things like a bi-county walk effort, incentives for businesses to promote exercise and nutrition in their workforces and other innovative strategies to combat the epidemic obesity and chronic disease condition that many Long Islanders live with.
Health care is undergoing a paradigm shift toward prevention over treatment, Zucker said, and basic exercise must not be overlooked – especially for the aging population.
“Just as a doctor, I’ve found when people stop walking, stop moving, everything starts breaking down,” he said.
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