Community Resource Council

The Record recently featured an article about 4-year-old Emily Santana, who became a young victim of our current healthcare crisis. Her family turned to Diana DiGirolamo and the CRC for assistance:

At the advice of Emily’s doctors, her father, Tito Santana, scheduled what some medical experts dubbed lifesaving surgery for Emily’s epilepsy. But the insurance company refused to pay, and the surgery was canceled three days before it was to be performed at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

Santana, who lives in Lodi, was distraught. He turned to the Hackensack-based Community Resource Council, a crisis intervention center. Diana DiGirolamo, the group’s executive director, feverishly worked the phones and fax machines and sent letter after letter until she secured new insurance coverage for Emily’s procedure.

“She’s like an angel,” Santana said of DiGirolamo, who smiled modestly. “Our policy is to help as much as we can to facilitate solutions,” she responded. “We handle the most desperate cases when nobody else can help.”

Read the full article here.