Donation Policies
Unlike many other nonprofit organizations, Preventive Health Strategies does not rely on any funding from government grants. Our support comes entirely from private individuals, associations, foundations, and businesses who entrust us with resources so that we can fulfill our humanitarian mission.
All funds we have received for specific tragedies have been devoted entirely to those events. We have absorbed all administrative costs to honor the intent of donors who restricted their contributions while ensuring disaster victims receive the fullest measure of assistance possible. This has left us with a challenge – to cover the costs of our already lean general operations.
By clarifying that we may use your contribution wherever most needed, you allow us to strengthen the long-term health systems that are vital to vulnerable people around the world and respond to emergencies that do not receive widespread attention. We commit to spend your money in the most productive, efficient way possible.
If you wish to restrict the use of your donation only for a specific purpose or area, we will honor that wish or inform you that we cannot and offer to return your contribution. We have not and will not collect money for what may appear to be a specific incident or purpose with the intention of using it for other purposes.
Valuation of in-kind resources
Preventive Health Strategies' programs involve a wide range of functions, several of which require specialized expertise and licensing. Among these functions are identifying key local providers of health services in such areas; working to identify the unmet needs of people in the areas; mobilizing essential medicines, supplies, and equipment that are requested and appropriate for the circumstances; and managing the many details inherent in storing, transporting, and distributing such goods to the partner organizations in the most efficient manner possible.
To fulfill its mission and program objectives, Preventive Health Strategies has long sought partnerships with businesses and organizations with particular expertise that is needed and can be leveraged for humanitarian purposes. This approach has led to more than 100 healthcare manufacturers and other corporations, in sectors ranging from technology to transportation, donating needed goods and services that would otherwise have to be purchased.
Preventive Health Strategies also solicits and receives financial contributions, which are used to cover internal costs and for goods and services to advance the organization’s mission and that cannot be obtained through donation.
The strategic pursuit of in-kind resources – both goods and services – enables Preventive Health Strategies to provide far more humanitarian assistance than would be possible in a model that relied entirely upon raising cash and then converting the cash into goods and services. It makes little economic sense to incur the expense involved in raising funds to then purchase something that a business may be willing and able to provide directly and more efficiently as its charitable contribution.
Valuation Methodology
The specifics of Preventive Health Strategies' valuation methodology are noted here in recognition of the confusion that can arise with regard to the value of contributed goods and services. One source of confusion stems from the significant pricing (and therefore valuation) differences that exist in different parts of the world for similar products. With regard to pharmaceutical products, significant differences exist between a branded drug and a generic equivalent formulation even within the within the same market, including the U.S. Because Preventive Health Strategies operates on a global scale, such differences must be considered and reflected in the accounting and reporting of contributions.
Of course, similar pricing and valuation differences also exist for other commodities and services beyond pharmaceuticals. In the U.S., for example, the commodity of water may be the easiest example, since the price that is paid for the same compound, H2O, ranges from free in a public tap to several dollars for a “branded” equivalent bottled quantity in a hotel room. But similar pricing differences exist for services as well. The outsourcing and off-shoring phenomena reflect that even highly skilled services – surgery, computer programming, research conducted by Ph.D.s – are done at vastly different prices in different countries.
Preventive Health Strategies ensures that these distinctions are clearly documented and that the organization’s financial reporting precisely and accurately reflects the fair market value of the specific items received through donation. If a low-cost generic medication is received through donation, its value is properly recorded. If a more expensive branded product is received through donation, its value is properly recorded.
As noted above, Preventive Health Strategies has long sought the contribution of needed goods and services to use for humanitarian purposes because of the efficiencies and other benefits that result. The organization, and more importantly the people it serves, benefit from the lowest-cost, most efficient use of resources. So too do financial contributors, since their financial contributions are not being used to purchase goods or services that can be obtained directly through donations. Therefore, when it comes to accounting for, documenting, and reporting any contributions it is very important that we get it right.
Valuation of in kind donations
When Preventive Health Strategies receives an in-kind donation, accounting standards require a “fair market value” to be assigned to the donation. Donations of medicines, medical equipment, and medical supplies have long been an integral part of Preventive Health Strategies’ humanitarian assistance programs.
In assigning a fair market value to the in-kind donations received, Preventive Health Strategies uses a careful, conservative approach that complies with the relevant accounting standards, and the spirit and purpose of disclosure, transparency, and accountability to the public.
The organization determines wholesale value by reviewing the pricing information on the specific item listed for sale in trade publications, through online pricing, and through its own procurement history when purchasing. Such valuations typically are substantially lower than published retail prices.
Haiti Donations Policy
Preventive Health Strategies is among the many organizations that has witnessed a tremendously generous response to the tragedy in Haiti. With the public being encouraged by many sources to donate, we believe it important to clarify how Preventive Health Strategies will use the money we receive.
100% of funds donated for Haiti will be used exclusively for programmatic activities related to Haiti. None of the funds donated for Haiti will be used to pay for fundraising or administrative expenses, or for programmatic activities in other places. Preventive Health Strategies able to do this because fundraising and administrative expenses are being covered by Sioux Falls area businesses.
General donations make it possible for Preventive Health Strategies to respond to this and other emergencies, as well as conduct our ongoing humanitarian health work around the world and in the United States. All of these activities are compelling and important to serve people who need help.
Preventive Health Strategies is committed to honoring donors’ intentions. Preventive Health Strategies will not redirect any funds that we receive for Haiti to any other purpose or area. There is no fine print or qualification – if a donation is designated by a donor for Haiti, it is treated as a restricted contribution and will be used only to assist Haiti. Consistent with our standard practices, an internal fund has been established to account for, track, and report all such donations into the Haiti fund, and expenses from it.
To ensure that we understand a donor’s intention, Preventive Health Strategies' online donations page requires a donor to select among options before completing a donation. Also, we have asked that donors sending in donations by mail indicate “Haiti” if they wish to designate their donation.
In addition to financial contributions described above, an element of Preventive Health Strategies' longstanding program model also involves the provision of medical materials, including medicines, equipment, surgical supplies, nutritional, and other in-kind medical resources. A large percentage of these materials are donated by the manufacturers, many of which we have worked with since our first day as an organization.
Preventive Health Strategies must comply with stringent requirements in the U.S. and internationally. We only accept material that is suitable, and only provide it when it is appropriate for the circumstances and requested by a qualified partner organization that will use them. In accounting for and describing any medical material contributions, the wholesale financial value is used.
Preventive Health Strategies' urgent priority is to assist people in Haiti. In noting these seemingly technical matters, such as internal accounting practices, the distinction between general and restricted contributions, and the valuation methodology assigned to material aid, we wish simply to inform members of the public who have shown such generosity and deserve to know how their contributions will be used.
Worm & Parasite Treatment
Worms contribute to about 200,000 needless deaths every year. Giardia alone is highly contagious and causes severe diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration. Lives are saved with simple medicine. In clinic we often see parasite-infected children with the extended stomachs (see the picture). You can help keep parasites and worms from hurting more children by providing simple medicines and basic education to teach how to prevent getting worms and parasites in the future. Help us by providing life saving medicine and education.
Burn Prevention
Open fires are common in most of the third world for heating and cooking. Children are often severely burned. Teaching how to build fires in safe areas and how to treat burns immediately saves lives and heartache.
This child had second and third degree burns from falling into a cooking fire. He was treated in clinic and his mother was taught how to change his dressings and how to prevent future accidents. His mother walked almost a full day to bring him to the clinic after the accident. (Picture from one of Preventive Health Strategies' clinics. )
Clean Water
Everyday 4,200 children die of water-related diseases. Your gift will help save children from parasites, worms, dysentery, cholera and other life threatening diseases that people get from contaminated water. Help us to provide life saving education on how to clean water and water purification techniques that can be used everywhere, even without a well.
Rehydration Solution
Families are endangered around the world everyday from dehydration. Once children get a small infection they instantly become dehydrated, threatening their life. Help us to provide life saving hydration solutions and health education classes on how make your own hydration solutions absent of any medical care providers. Help hydrate those suffering by clean water hydration solutions with the proper electrolytes to save their life. (PHS providing rehydration for a suspected cholera patient. Fluids are being delivered orally through a syringe by a caring nurse.)
Mission Based Health Care
Dr. Bosworth is ever mindful of her call to teach as well as serve in Haiti. She has created a course of study for which Haiti is the lecture hall, the laboratory, and the textbook.
Student doctor Alicia Palmer discovered how thoroughly Haiti can teach. “Not having access to lab tests and X-rays means pausing to thinking critically about the symptom picture, your physical findings, and the most likely outcomes.”
That’s precisely what Dr. Bosworth learned on her first visit to Haiti. She returned to South Dakota knowing she’d just practiced, by far, the best medicine of her life! Student Kayt Calmus describes the same feeling. In Haiti, she says, a physician learns to rely on her own skills to examine a patient and ask the right questions. Kayt returned from her Haiti trip revitalized in her dedication to medicine.
Time spent in Haiti can encourage medical students to fashion careers around strong commitment to patients of every socio-economic station. “Our current medical culture in the U.S. focuses on an altruistic goal of delivering exceptional care without considering who will pay the bill or how,” adds Dr. Bosworth. “In Haiti, students will confront the connection between poverty and little or no medical care. I believe this mission experience will change a medical student forever!”
Students looking ahead to a medical degree can learn from this trip as well. Sam Fogas, a pre-med student at the University of Minnesota, had no idea how hands-on his Haiti experience would be. “I did (medical) things I never imagined I’d get to do this early in my career.”
Sam’s assigned role on the Haiti team was triage—determining which patients coming through the door were most in need of immediate care. “Along with another pre-med student and a social worker, I took temperatures, checked blood pressure, and interviewed patients through a translator.”
To be sure, that was a valuable service and useful experience for a future medical practitioner. But Sam is more likely to tell his college classmates about standing by as the Preventive Health Strategies (PHS) medical team performed four in-the-moment surgeries. “We got to be right there to see her deal with a very bad bacterial arm infection, for one thing. Dr. Bosworth explained why she did one procedure and not another.”
Sam was there when a small earthquake shook the makeshift operating room. Interpreters ran outside, fearing a repeat of the massive 2010 event in Haiti. The PHS team didn’t react to the tremors but stayed focused on completing the life-saving operation.
South Dakota
Poverty and poor health reinforce each other everywhere, but better access to health services for people stuck in this cycle is integral to positive change on a humanitarian level and for economic productivity.
Health has intrinsic value for every person, but it is also essential for people to learn, work, and make a living. Sick people who don’t receive care can’t work, and they get poor or stay poor; and people who are poor are at higher risk of getting sick. Breaking this vicious cycle is an enormously complex endeavor requiring change in many areas other than health services. But under any scenario, better access to health services is essential.
Preventive Health Strategies medical assistance programs equip health professionals working in resource-poor communities to better meet the challenges of diagnosing, treating, and caring for people without regard to politics, religion, gender, race, or ability to pay.
Medical Assisted Recovery
Technology makes this program special by establishing and supporting personal relationships. Dr. Annette Bosworth explains, “Conventional programs falter by removing a patient from everyone who matters—everyone affected by the addiction.”
The comprehensive Preventive Health Strategies model leverages technology to create improved access to services and allows aftercare services for as long as needed. Moreover, technology makes treatment less costly while reinventing the entire process by offering individually tailored, user-centered treatment combined with personal interaction at every step in the recovery process.
Initially, a patient undergoes a comprehensive online assessment that will be used to design the new treatment plan. This information gathering may sound time consuming but ultimately it leads to a responsive communication cycle of teaching, coaching, and electronic feedback. In addition, the program also offers medically assisted treatment using Vivitrol® (naltreone for extended-release injectable suspension).
In this video, Dr. Bosworth talking about how Vivitrol works to improve treatment effectiveness. Preventive Health Strategies patients complete intensive outpatient medical stabilization with monitored medical support. They wear discrete biomonitoring patches that constantly communicate with a central computer system to warn them whenever their stress levels are high. They also receive mobile phone prompting to complete ongoing health assessments that proactively discourage a return to self-destructive behavior.
Patients participate in training to hone coping and refusal skills. They learn how to identify triggers that may lead to poor choices. Using mobile phone global-positioning features, the Preventive Health Strategies computer system can alert recovering addicts when they are in a trigger setting and contact their support network, too. Through their phones and computer calendars, Preventive Health Strategies will help addicts reinvent themselves socially and recreationally by regularly suggesting recovery-friendly activities.
Patients and members of their individual support networks are educated about the nature of addiction and the path to reinventing their lives. As treatment progresses, we will alert them to informational websites, online support groups, and online instructional videos. The state of South Dakota estimates that 3000 inmates could be redirected to a Medical Assisted Treatment program instead of prison. The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation estimates that for every $1 spent on Medical Assisted Treatment the state would save $3.88.
Preventive Health Strategies program uses two of the safest, cutting edge medications to
help reduce thediscomfort involved in ending your opiate addiction - Subutex and
Suboxone.
Subutex and Suboxone are FDA approved medications used to treat opiate
dependence. Both medications contain the active ingredient, buprenorphine hydrochloride.
This drug works by reducing the symptoms of opioid dependence.
With these new
medications, stabilization from heroin or pain pills doesn't have to be a painful experience.
These medications help to bridge the patient to sobriety and are used only short term.
For
Alcohol stabilization, we carefully instruct the client and supporting family or friends to
closely monitor for response to medications that are essential during the alcohol withdrawal
period. We also educate for signs of seizure and side effects from the medications that may
include sedation, irregular breathing, or confusion. Our medical staff will determine if a
higher level of care is needed during the evaluation. Most of our clients can be safely
stabilized from opiates or alcohol as an outpatient, without long disruptions from
professional, academic, or personal life.
Anti-Craving Medications
Preventive Health Strategies program contracts an approved provider of Vivitrol
(Naltrexone), the first and only once-monthly injectable medication to treat opiate and
alcohol dependence.
Vivitrol is a non-narcotic, non-addictive medication used in
combination with cognitive therapy to treat opiate and alcohol dependence and to
prevent relapse following stabilization.
Individual Therapy
Once the client is stabilized, individual psychotherapy begins with one of our
experienced therapists or counselors. Discussed are themes such as core conflictual
relationships, trauma and emotional pain.
Group Therapy and Lectures
Most of the work is done in group therapy. Many find this non-12 step approach
very enlightening and consider it an important component to our Preventive Health
Strategies Program. Here clients learn how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
effectively changes the way one thinks. Biology of Addiction lectures are also very
popular topics discussed.
Family Group Therapy
Oftentimes, families of the struggling addict are the most effected psychologically.
Family group therapy is offered as part of the comprehensive treatment approach.
This allows the whole family system to heal together. |
“Addicts build substitute relationships with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or something
else. I can administer drugs to curb urges but we only win because we establish new,
constructive relationships to replace the destructive ones,” says Dr. Annette Bosworth.
One of the most vital new relationships in the Preventive Health Strategies Program
will be between patient and physician.
Recovering addict and successful college student Miles Tate describes the strength of his
communication channel through the Preventive Health Strategies Program. “It’s not that
I call my doctor for every little thing…but when I feel irritable, when I’m stuck, we need
to do something about it right away. Nine months into my withdrawal Dr. Annette and I
still talk a lot on the patient portal. This isn’t the sort of program where they say, ‘We’re
done here!’”
In order to satisfy a patient’s need for a physician to listen, advise, and coach, we preface
the first patient consultation with an extensive electronic question-and-answer process.
“What we collect goes far beyond a standard medical history,” Dr. Bosworth explains.
“We ask the kind of questions that initiate a dialogue. For instance: ‘What was the best
day of your life?’”
Dr. Bosworth’s Health IT methods enable the Preventive Health Strategies conversation
to continue outside office hours without expanding patient costs. She’s created a
responsive system of listening, coaching, and even homework assignments. “We aim to
give the best service with fewer roadblocks between us and the patient.” |
Preventive Health Strategies, a nonprofit, created ECHO Kids to combat upward spiraling childhood obesity and diabetes rates. We believe regular exercise is one way to combat the trend. And if that regular exercise program turns out to be fun for kids…that’s so much better!
ECHO Kids (Educating Children for Healthier Outcomes) program started in the schoolyard of one Sioux Falls elementary school and eventually attracted the attention of the Sioux Falls Y®. No matter where the kids meet, the emphasis is the same: developing healthy habits to last a lifetime.
With watchful and enthusiastic supervision from their trainers, elementary students develop skills and learn about nutrition. “Five carrots provide you enough energy to walk a mile!” “Water is better for you than carbonated drinks!” One dad reports, “We love it that this advice is coming from you and not from us! He’s paying attention because you’re his coaches.”
ECHO Kids trainers bear witness as children increase their physical competency. Becoming physically fit makes a kid stand taller while climbing higher or running faster. Coach Amy Peterson remembers, “At the beginning of this past summer, there were kids who couldn’t run a single lap. By the time school started, they were volunteering to run the mile in our ECHO Kids Olympics!”
ECHO Kids and the Sioux Falls YMCA have joined forces to offer this innovative fitness and health program to more children. The combined program is called Just Play. Enrollment is ongoing.
www.meaningfulmedicine.org
