Community health center

up

and started to work with community health center clients as one of our first client profiles and was just blown away with how much we could add value for this particular provider segment because CHCs are at the heart of value-based care.

They live and breathe primary care models by design.

But unfortunately, they're usually the last to be considered.

They get the crumbs in the value-based care conversation, right? The large medical groups, the large systems command most of that attention from the payer because of who they are, the brand name, the market share.

When you think about what CHCs are doing, that's really where care is happening.

It's in those communities with the underserved, with the most vulnerable, with moms and with babies.

And so for us to be able to help CHCs understand their own earning potential, understand the power they have based on their quality performance and their contribution to the payers overall, it's been a rewarding experience.

Let's don't worry about the long COVID.

And just sort of speaking about the issues of making sure that we provide the Black community with great care community health centers, which we're involved in here in our state.

We run the largest one, but all across the country, very committed to making sure that all populations, but the Black population in particular, are getting good access to good care.

And everybody can always improve the system of care that they have In the country, so important.

I really want to applaud you for what you are doing and being a partner with community-based health centers.

These centers are still undervalued in so many ways throughout our states and our nation.

And I think that the notion of the beauty of community health centers in one of the major parts of the beauty of them is that they're community boarded.

that the people who live in the community themselves are taking responsibility and accountability for helping to strategically design, helping to execute, and helping to monitor the success of these kinds of programs.

We're actually getting ready to start our fifth cohort of that in October.

We've done several webinars, Steve, and recently we've done a couple on H.R. 1, the big beautiful bill, and how that is going to impact health center revenue and health center Medicaid patients.

So I really want to talk some more about that today because I just think that the numbers that are coming out of NACH and, and the research that's being done right now are pretty alarming, and so we'll get into that.

But why don't you just fill us in on the overall vibe of CHI this year.

Yeah.

I mean, besides being shocked by the prices in Las Vegas, they were pretty much all talking about H.R. 1 and particularly what it does to our Medicaid panels.

I don't think I ran into a single person there that's at a leadership level at a health center that didn't bring that up at some point in the conversation.

Yeah, and what would you say are the early numbers already showing when it comes down to H.R. 1? I mean, I know that you and I have talked, and we've done a, a webinar on this, that it's really a procedural problem because they're expecting about eighty-five percent of the coverage losses are going to be procedural with the redeterminations and the work requirements, et cetera.

again, really go back to our partners, our local physicians, our nurse practitioners.

Again, Northumberland, Trent Hills, Lakeview Family Health Teams, Community Health Centers of Northumberland.

Ontario Health at Home, the Northumberland County from a recruitment perspective, helping us support recruitment for physicians and nurse practitioners.

We work in tandem with all these partners to help kind of support the system and drive it forward so that many of our residents can be attached.

Ontario Health at Home pushes a lot of information.

You have the Ministry of Health that pushes a lot of information.

And so we've also, some of the local doctors, you know, for example, if you go to the community health centers of Northumberland, there are packages there that are revolved around Healthcare Connect, how you can connect to get to a doctor.

We're definitely working with some of our acute care partners on establishing better pathways as well and working with our community partners as well to establish some of those pathways to ensure information is being brought up about Healthcare Connect so that people and the residents of Northumberland County know what Healthcare Connect is about and that they can register to the Healthcare Connect waitlist and be able to get quickly, hopefully quickly attached to a primary care provider.

Medicaid, community health centers, and the lives they've collectively made better are an American success story, but a new chapter is being written in that story, and our guest has been an active participant in implementing and chronicling

it.

We estimated, and this now goes back quite a number of months, and I'll tell you why that's important in a minute, that nearly 6 million community health center patients, more than 5.6 million health center patients, would lose their coverage because of the mandatory work requirement.

Well, Dr. Jacobs, Fagola, thank you for joining Conversations on Healthcare.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, you know, one of your most recent research pieces examined the 60-year relationship between Medicaid and community health centers, which form the backbone of healthcare for the underserved.

And you looked at the challenges for both programs as they face really some of the biggest Medicaid cuts in history.

Tell us about what you wrote.

This is In Practice, a podcast where healthcare leaders, clinicians, and practice administrators discuss challenges ambulatory practices face every day with strategies to overcome them.

Community health centers have always cared for people with complex medical, behavioral, social, and economic needs.

They focus on prevention, they know their communities, and they often keep patients connected to care, even when the system around things seems to be making that harder than it should be.

Now, this is why value-based care is such an important conversation for health centers.

And in many ways, the model is catching up to what community health centers already have been doing for many years, delivering whole-person care, improving access, and helping patients stay healthier over time.

But for value based care to work in the real world, the full complexity of the patient needs to be visible.

Documentation needs to support accurate risk capture.

Thank you again for joining us.

And I thought one thing I haven't done is managed anything.

And so there was a community health center out here in the Seattle area group called the Community Health Centers of King County that was hiring trying to find a family doctor that would help them bring in alternative medicine into one of their six family medicine clinics.

So these are community health centers are work with underserved populations, poor, different racial, ethnic minority groups.

But it was interesting as they wanted to set up the nation's first publicly funded integrative alternative medicine clinic.

And because of my background and openness of working with Jim Gordon, I got the job.