A Tale of Two CHCs

A couple of months ago, I was invited to the 40^th anniversary celebration and new building dedication of the Community Health Center in Middletown, Connecticut.  I regretted that I couldn’t go – a family obligation came first.

The Community Health Center started as a free clinic in a converted, second floor apartment in a downtown building.  It was about the time I was starting college, and a number of students at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, were among those who got it started.  One was John Hickenlooper, now the Governor of Colorado. 

I remember when it started to see its first patients, when it began to grow, and when it hired its first full-time doctor. 

Believing the health care was a right, not a privilege, its Board and CEO, Mark Masselli, worked hard to meet the need for safety net health care in the community.

By the time I entered the State Legislature in 1979, it was a fixture in my legislative district.  I got to know the operation fairly well over the next decade, and worked closely with the Center on a number of legislative initiatives.

The Community Health Center was one of the first centers in the nation to become an FQHC “look alike,” and later on it became a full Federally Qualified Health Center.  It used its federal dollars wisely, expanding its primary care, dental, and behavioral health care services.  Over time, it added locations in Old Saybrook, New London, Groton, Meriden, and New Britain. 

And it continued to invest in the north end Middletown neighborhood which it called home.  It developed a school-based health center.  It expanded health care services into other underused office buildings.  It even leased an unsafe eyesore of a vacant lot from the city and created a beautiful urban garden.

Today, the Community Health Center provides services to 130,000 patients in 13 cities in 201 service locations throughout Connecticut.  That’s what forty years of dedication and commitment to a cause can deliver.

Sometimes, when I return to Palm Beach County, where I live today, from a visit to Middletown, I feel like I am stepping forty years into my health care past. 

I mean this in a good way, because there are important things happening these days in Palm Beach County that happened in my part of Connecticut forty years ago. 

In the past five years:

• A new medical school opened at Florida Atlantic University, which reminds me of the UConn Health Center’s opening in the late 1960s.
• A new internal medicine residency program was started at JFK Hospital in Atlantis, FL, which reminds me of the family practice residency that began at Middlesex Hospital in the early 1970s and trained the primary care clinicians who gave me my medical home for over twenty years.
• Scripps and Max Planck established a first-class research presence in the county, much like we had at Yale University back when I was in Connecticut.

But what makes me feel just as good about the quality of healthcare in Palm Beach County is that the appropriately named Genesis Community Health Center just became one of the newest federally qualified health centers in America, because of dollars included in the Affordable Care Act.

Today, Genesis Community Health operates out of a small space in a shopping center in Boynton Beach Florida.  But, like the Community Health Center, it has big thinkers behind it.  It started from nothing in 2009, opened its doors for the first time in 2010, has already been at the forefront of primary and behavioral health care integration, and has now received its first federal community health center grant.

Genesis has joined over 1,200 centers nationwide providing services at over 8,000 delivery sites for over 20 million people – a network that within a decade may see almost as many patients each year as every hospital in America combined.   Many community health center patients are on Medicare or Medicaid, some are privately insured, and others pay their own way.

Community health centers may see health care as a right, and it is a privilege to witness what they accomplish every day.

When you look at what the Community Health Center – and so many of the long-established federally qualified health centers in America – bring to the health care table, it is hard to imagine life without them.

And when you look at the bright promise of Genesis – and others in development in Palm Beach County and beyond – it is hard not to be excited about their future.  Genesis may not accomplish over the next 40 years what the Community Health Center has accomplished over the last 40, but I wouldn't bet against it.

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