Oregon Health Authority Director Sejal Hathi kicks off community meetings in Willamette Valley

Dr. Sejal Hathi, director of the Oregon Health Authority, recently completed three days of visits with local leaders, health care organizations, community advocates and providers in the Willamette Valley about their community needs.

Hathi, who began as director on Jan. 16, said she plans to make four more visits to cover major regions of the state to help forge an ongoing relationship between OHA and the communities it serves. OHA manages the delivery of most of Oregon's health care programs, such as state's Medicaid program Oregon Health Plan. It has budget of $35 billion for 2023-2025 budget and more than 5,000 employees.

Hathi said the visits and what she is learning are providing her an opportunity to center the needs of communities as she establishes priorities as director.

“What I've heard from a lot of the folks that we're visiting with is no one has deeply listened to them in a considerable period of time,” said Hathi. “They have a lot to say.”

In Eugene and Springfield, she met with local public health and mental health authorities from Lane, Lincoln, Benton and Linn counties. She also met with PacificSource and Trillium, two of the state’s coordinated care organizations, which coordinate networks of OHP health care providers in the surrounding area.

In Lebanon, Hathi met with representatives from the Farmworker Housing Development Corporation and Casa Latinos Unidos to talk about projects to promote community health through affordable housing for low-income, farmworker and migrant families.

Hathi and other OHA staff accompanying her were given a tour of Colonia Paz, a 140-unit workforce housing and community center.

Hathi ended her visits last week in Salem where she met with local public health and mental health organizations from Yamhill, Marion and Polk counties.

In the coming months she and OHA staff will visit communities in Pendleton, Bend, Hood River and Portland.

During conversations with community organizations in Willamette Valley, she said she heard of workforce shortages in behavioral health care and local struggles to provide enough treatment resources for those in need.

“We have to ensure that ideas will be effectively delivered in different contexts, rural, coastal, and urban, all,” Hathi said. “Sometimes we don't do that well. And so, I've heard about the negative consequences of that.”

'Haphazardly hurled' money won't solve behavioral health, substance use

The ongoing behavioral health and substance-use crisis in Oregon is one of Hathi’s top priorities.

Hathi said she believes Oregon already has put a lot of money into delivering behavioral health care and substance-use treatment to communities.

The next step is to come up with plan to reform the system because the funding has not been allocated in a way that targets individual community needs, she said.

“The reality is that this is a problem that has been building for decades, that has been underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed for decades; and $1 billion, however amazing is that largesse, haphazardly hurled at the problem is not going to solve it,” said Hathi.

Eliminating health care inequities among Hathi's goals for OHA

Hathi said she also wants to prioritize eliminating health inequities by 2030 a more tangible OHA goal.

She has enlisted a team to develop a three-year plan to come up with actionable strategies and data metrics that can be used to measure success and hold the agency accountable.

Another priority is improving access to affordable care, to reduce the likelihood of severe medical debt.

"I think as a state, we've been focused a lot on (health care) coverage, but we're doing quite well on insurance coverage at 95% and climbing soon with OHP Bridge and our continuous eligibility programs," Hathi said.

"Now we need to start looking at the affordability of that coverage," she said.

Sydney Wyatt covers health care inequities in the Mid-Willamette Valley for the Statesman Journal. Send comments, questions, and tips to her atSWyatt@gannett.com, (503) 399-6613, or on Twitter@sydney_elise44

The Statesman Journal’s coverage of health care inequities is funded in part by theM.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which seeks to strengthen the cultural, social, educational, and spiritual base of the Pacific Northwest through capacity-building investments in the nonprofit sector.