Open Door Family Medical Centers is rapidly approaching the 40th anniversary of the once all-volunteer clinic.
The community health center began in 1972 as a basement operation at the First Baptist Church in Ossining.
It now serves some 40,000 patients and can document just how the shift from paper records to the electronic went, a process CEO Lindsay Farrell called a “huge expense for practices.”
“First of all, you have to put in your backbone,” she said. “You have to be wired so you can have computers in every single room ”¦ the electronic system is very, very important in being able to do efficient care at the point of care.”
Open Door came close to spending $2 million during that transition, Farrell said.
In 2009 the center received $650,000 in stimulus funding to retain and create jobs.
An additional $1.3 million in funding for facility improvements and health information technology was procured.
“The economy was turning down and we were very concerned about our finances,” Farrell said. “We were thinking about having to make our staff smaller, so that program actually preserved jobs and allowed us to hire additional full-time employees.”
Farrell said the center is in the process of spending the $1.3 million, which “came to us in a number of buckets.”
One capital project means an expanded dental program for the Sleepy Hollow site as well as new computers.
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The medical records rooms at the Ossining and Port Chester centers will be converted into exam rooms.
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For the Mount Kisco office, Farrell said a mobile dental van will be parked at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Northern Westchester.
In respect to construction of new centers, Farrell said “we do have some interest down county and to the north. It takes time. But hopefully within the next five years, we”™ll be expanding some more.”
Not only has Open Door secured additional funding, the nonprofit health center just earned Level 3 Recognition, the highest rank allotted by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) as a patient-centered medical home.
To obtain the title, the NCQA requires practices to produce documented evidence for nine specific requirements.
“Health care policymakers and leaders across the country are frustrated by the state of health care in the U.S. and they recognize that it”™s overly fragmented,” Farrell said. “They realize a lot of people leave the hospital only to be readmitted, so in our setting of primary care, the state and federal policymakers were looking for much more coordination.”
Farrell said that resulted in the NCQA acting as an external accreditor to ensure quality care practices in addition to entities such as The Joint Commission, a national health-care accreditation and standards group.
“In 2009, the state of New York said, ”˜Look, we really want to give incentives for high-quality care and the way we”™re going to do that is if practices receive their NCQA medical home certification.”™”
“That was a huge incentive for us because we”™re a big Medicaid and Medicaid-managed care provider,” Farrell said of the rigorous certification process. “It was a lot of work, but I think the principals are really important.”
