How people live in older life is not only influenced by the supports available, but also our ability to access them.  About a third of older Mainers live just above poverty; they don’t have enough money to meet their basic needs, but most don’t qualify for means-tested benefits.

These folks do without – without food, necessary home repair, help in the home and even without prescriptions they need.  And, when it gets bad, they often look to their town government to help.

Over the last several years of work, we’ve been focusing on how we build an integrated system of formal and informal supports and care that prioritizes low cost/high value interventions and that build across all systems – volunteer community efforts, municipal services, social services, and health care.  This is an all hands on deck approach and all efforts have to weave together.

While we had strategies for volunteer initiatives, community-based organizations and health care, we didn’t know how to bring municipal leaders into the conversation and to help them leverage their investments to influence the quality and number of services available to people in the community.

So, we’ve built the M-DASH model around this question: Can municipal officials, with proper data and support, collaborate with health systems, social service providers, payers, and volunteer groups to improve access to health and social health services for older residents?

We started with a Task Force on Healthy Aging in Community in 2019.  This Task Force helped us understand what data would be relevant for a municipality and how we could develop those sources.  We also created an action planning process to use to help communities get started on the work.

But, the Task Force recommend we pilot the data dashboard and action planning process before we grow the efforts larger.

In January 2020, we received a Robert Wood Johnson DASH CIC-START grant to create the data dashboard with one community.  We started with South Portland.  We brought municipal officials, social service providers, healthcare providers, payers and volunteers to the table to take about data relevant to the municipality.  We started broadly, because we were looking at all data, and then narrowed our working group when they decided to focus on reducing falls. 

We secured additional funding from the Maine Health Access Foundation, the Bingham Program, and most recently the Betterment Fund, to do the next phase of the work: action planning with South Portland and piloting the whole process with three additional communities.

We chose Eastport, Hallowell and Gray as the three communities.  We have funding committed for two additional years.  The goal is to add four new communities in 2022.

After creating the data dashboard for each community, we have an action planning document that helps prioritize action. Then, we look at models from other places in Maine and the Country and then work as a team to implement projects that will work in your community to address the issues presented by the data. 

As this project progresses into the next phases and beyond, we are including reports, documents, and recordings of meetings for you to access and download.  Please see below.

Reports and Resources

Municipal Task Force on Healthy Aging 2019 Phase 1 Report 

Municipal Task Force 2019 Data Dashboard Samples 5-8-20

All M-DASH Pilots Meeting 4-19-23

 Guide for Starting and Running a Home Repairs Program