October is Corps Community Month, now in its fifth year to bring awareness on the importance of the primary care workforce in improving health. This month highlights the benefits and impact of the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) programs in bringing more health care providers into underserved communities with limited access. The NHSC increases access [...]
Getting enough primary care providers into rural areas is a struggle everywhere- and AZ is no exception. Each state needs to have a coordinated and creative strategy to the get these critical access to care resources to the right places. We have a few strategies. One is the J1 Visa Program. Each year, we provide (through the [...]
If you live in or have visited the rural towns and cities in Arizona, it’s not a surprise that many of these rural locations don’t have enough healthcare providers. Based on current provider shortage data from the federal HRSA, we need an additional 170 primary care providers and 54 mental health providers to adequately care [...]
For many uninsured Arizonans, a doctor’s visit is a luxury that they simply can’t afford. That is unless they’re visiting a Sliding Fee Schedule Clinic. These clinics are a vital part of our healthcare system and provide a broad range of primary care, dental and mental health services to uninsured patients regardless of their ability [...]
Our team at the Bureau of Health Systems Development recently posted a new interactive website to help people easily locate a clinic that provides free or low cost primary, mental and dental health services to people without health insurance. These Sliding Fee Schedule clinics determine, based on gross family income, the portion of billed charges [...]
We all need to take care of both our physical and behavioral health needs in order to be healthy. The mind and body aren't separated- and neither should the health-care delivery system- especially for folks with a serious mental illness. Folks with a serious mental illness die more than 25 years earlier than the general [...]
Our own Madan Gopal from I.T. has been invited by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to participate in a national Roundtable discussion about the role and use of health IT to fill the needs of behavioral health providers, to integrate behavioral health record data into primary care, and on how ”Meaningful Use” could [...]
The Institute of Medicine just released a consensus report called "Primary Care and Public Health: Promoting Integration to Improve Population Health" that identified several principles that public health and primary care could work toward further integration- including the goals of population health improvement, aligned leadership, sustainability, community engagement, and the collaborative use of data and analysis. Check it out and send the [...]
This year’s theme for Primary Care Week is “Innovations in Primary Care”, focusing on ways health systems can reinvent their practices to promote continuous, comprehensive, and coordinated health care for their patients. Community Health Centers are models of comprehensive primary care, delivering these services in medically under-served areas to persons of all ages regardless of [...]
We’re proud to join in the celebration of National Health Center Week by highlighting Health Centers throughout our State and the vital services they provide. Community Health Centers are community-based, patient directed organizations that provide services to medically underserved areas. These valuable safety net providers offer full-time comprehensive primary and preventative care to patients regardless of their [...]
