Rooted in Communities: National Campaign Celebrates Health Centers
Mosaic is proud to be part of a national campaign to increase awareness of the ways Community Health Centers are providing affordable healthcare throughout the nation. National Health Center Week 2019 is being celebrated from Aug. 4-10 with the theme of “Rooted in Communities.”
As part of a nationwide network of locally-run health centers that serve more than 28 million people in the United States, Mosaic is on the front lines of many national public health challenges including providing opioid treatment. Nearly half of health centers (44 percent) are located in rural communities and serve as a lifeline in areas where the nearest doctor or hospital can be as far as 50 miles or more away.
Over the last five decades, Community Health Centers have focused on:
- Reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and unnecessary visits to the emergency room;
- Treating patients for a fraction of the average cost of one emergency room visit;
- Serving more than one in six Medicaid beneficiaries for less than two percent of the national Medicaid budget;
- Lowering the cost of children’s primary care by approximately 35 percent; and
- Treating 65,000+ patients with Medication Assisted Therapy for opioid use disorder.
Health centers are at the forefront of a nationwide shift in addressing environmental and social factors as an integral part of primary care, reaching beyond the walls of conventional medicine to address additional factors that may cause sickness. These factors include lack of nutrition, mental illness, homelessness and addiction. Led by Community Health Centers, success in managing chronic disease in medically vulnerable communities has helped reduce health care costs for American taxpayers.
Over the course of their existence, health centers have saved countless lives, reduced and prevented chronic disease in the most challenged of patients, provided patients with affordable options for care that prevents costly hospital emergency room visit and responded to national health crises, such as the opioid epidemic. Because of their long record of success in innovation, managing healthcare costs, and reducing chronic disease, leaders in Congress have declared health centers a model of care that offers a “bipartisan solution to the primary care access problems” facing our nation. Through decades and through bipartisan administrations, Congress has consistently seen the value in growing the federal investment in the health center system of care.
To learn more about National Health Center Week, visit: www.healthcenterweek.org
To learn more about Mosaic, visit: www.mosaicch.org/about/
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