We support community health centers with an analytics platform and data consulting. The goal is to improve clinic operations and patient health, while building health center capacity along the way.
What does this mean, concretely? Helping a doctor plan for the day’s upcoming appointments. Allowing a health center to monitor opioid prescriptions, quickly launch a Covid immunization program, or reduce heart attacks and strokes by improving hypertension control. Check out our blog post on how Petaluma Health Center achieved the latter.
Community health centers provide primary care, dental care, mental health services, and more to poor and underserved communities across the country. They are the primary care safety net. The first health centers were founded in the 1960s, as part of the civil rights movement; today they serve more than 30 million patients per year. Health center patients are disproportionately low-income, people of color, uninsured, and publicly insured.
If you care about health equity, health centers are critical. They’re about building relationships of trust with patients who may not have much reason to trust the medical system. If you care about fixing our broken healthcare system more generally, health centers are also a strategic place to intervene: good primary care is not only a moral imperative, but a key to bending the cost curve.
Read more at the National Association of Community Health Centers, or check out this history of health centers from Health Affairs, or this issue brief on the growing importance of community health centers from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The White House briefing from mid-pandemic is a good place to start to learn about the critical role health centers played during Covid.
Read our employee benefits document for more details about these and other benefits.