Community Clinics Fill Gap in Health Coverage

Press Release

ROGERS : Community clinics fill gap in health coverage

BY TRACIE DUNGAN

As Shileene Juber perched on the end of the exam table Friday morning, she related how she didn't have a primary care doctor as recently as five months ago.

The Bentonville resident, who is due to give birth to her first child next week, has been receiving medical care at Community Clinic Rogers Medical since her 18 th week of pregnancy.

"I couldn't find prenatal care anywhere — and if you don't have insurance, you can't find a doctor," said Juber, 25.

So it took a trip to the emergency room for a urinary tract infection for Juber to learn of the clinic's existence.

Juber had figured that, with her $ 800-a-month in bringhome pay working as a full-time McDonald's manager, she probably qualified for Medicaid, but she didn't have her birth certificate and didn't know she could retrieve a duplicate.

The staff at the Rogers clinic helped her with applications for the birth record and Medicaid, so her pregnancy has gone smoothly and she is eagerly anticipating her girl Kelbi Night Juber's arrival.

Just down the hall, the staff was celebrating with an open house nearly a year after Community Clinic at St. Francis House in Springdale assumed ownership and management of Tree of Life Family Health Center, which was known for years as Poplar House.

Community Clinic Rogers Medical is the Springdale agency's first satellite medical clinic.

Now, each of the clinic's three medical providers — a family practitioner, pediatrician and advanced-practice nurse — has the help of a nurse and a bilingual medical assistant, said Kathy Grisham, executive director of the Springdale clinic, which is gearing up for a name change to Community Clinic Springdale Medical.

Overall, the staff of the Rogers clinic has increased from 12 to 17, she said. The clinic has added a service that processes Medicaid applications, both for adults and for ARKids First. And patients no longer must go to another site for lab tests, although the clinic still sends the results to an outside lab.

Grisham expects that by the end of this year, the Rogers clinic will have served about 5, 000 patients in 2008, nearly as many as at the Springdale clinic.

Altogether, her agency now has the two medical clinics and two dental clinics: Community Clinic Springdale Dental and Community Clinic Rogers Dental. She estimates the four will have 14, 000 patients this year who came for 40, 000 patient visits, which is up from the nearly 29, 097 medical and dental patient visits the three older clinics saw in 2007. The Springdale medical clinic alone is expected to log 5, 600 patients for 14, 000 patient visits this year.

In September 2005, when Poplar House became Tree of Life, it announced ambitions to expand its services to Medicaid patients, and later on to Medicare patients. It also wanted to get on track to become a federally qualified health center as designated by the federal Bureau of Primary Health Care.

Today's clinic accepts Medicaid, ARKids First, Medicare and private insurance, just as its Springdale counterpart does. All four Community Clinics have an income-based, sliding fee discount for the uninsured, and services are provided regardless of ability to pay on the same day as the visit.

About four years ago, the notfor-profit Springdale clinic was designated as a federally qualified health center, which allowed it to seek federal grants for itself and for partner or satellite clinics.

"People think of Northwest Arkansas as an area where people have a high level of income, but as we know, that is not the case," said U. S. Rep. John Boozman, who was on hand for Friday's open house.

The Springdale clinic secured a three-year, $ 600, 000 federal grant allowing it to expand services into Benton County, where the Tree of Life clinic had been targeted for possible closure by Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas, a financial decision wrapped up in a larger restructuring effort. Grisham and Mercy had been in talks about a possible partnership in the event the grant materialized.

The Rogers clinic is now its own federally qualified health center.

The grant was part of President Bush's "High Poverty Count Initiative," which identified the 200 poorest counties in the nation. Benton County, often regarded as one of Arkansas ' wealthiest, was among three counties in the state that qualified, along with Craighead County and Montgomery County.

In the grant application, Grisham's agency cited poverty pockets in Benton County as identified through U. S. Census data. It also used, among other things, federal health statistics to demonstrate limited access to affordable health care.

Community Clinic found more than 41 percent of Benton County's target population of 12, 785 people met federal poverty criteria for the program, compared with 39 percent for Arkansas and 30 percent for the United States. The service area covered low-income neighborhoods in Rogers, and rural areas such as Gravette, Decatur, Pea Ridge, Siloam Springs and Gentry.

"We have a number of people who are able to make a living, but they just can't afford health care for their families," Boozman said.

After untangling the red tape, Juber didn't have a chance to check out all those rumors as to how it's difficult to find a primary doctor to accept new Medicaid patients, so the Rogers clinic was her choice.

"I just now got Medicaid, like a week ago," she said. "I'm pending."

Source