Primary Health Solutions celebrates their health outreach mission in Butler County and beyond
When Primary Health Solutions began creating community health centers in the late 90s and early 2000s, they couldn’t have known that their model would soon be a valuable resource available in many cities in Butler County and beyond.
“We’ve been in double-digit growth, percentage-wise, for the past four years,” says Marc Bellisario, CEO of Primary Health Solutions. “We’ve continued to open new offices, and we now have a strong presence in school-based health centers, covering almost every large school district in Butler County.”
Primary Health Solutions is celebrating their many successes as they pursue their mission: “To improve community wellness through access to quality, affordable, integrated primary healthcare.”
The school-based health center growth began with a grant from their partners Interact for Health. The team at Primary Health Solutions was approached with the opportunity to create two school-based health centers in 2016. By 2020, they have launched four of these centers, and they are looking to launch a fifth in the coming year.
School-based health centers offer a variety of benefits to the community, not the least being easy access for students who are in the school systems themselves. Schools provide transportation for a variety of vision, dental, and medical needs. This helps students form a habit of strong primary healthcare when they are young.
The school-based health centers are open year-round, even when school isn’t in session, and are available to staff, family members of students, and community members who need to get connected to primary healthcare.
The school-based centers attempt to address multiple needs in a single location. The other Primary Health Solutions health centers, including their new center in Dayton, also bring different kinds of care under the same roof.
“We have multidisciplinary practices: pediatrics, adult medicine, behavioral health, dental, and addiction services,” explains Ronda Croucher, Vice President of Community Engagement at Primary Health Solutions. “We concentrate as many services at each site as possible to help those who have issues with transportation to get multiple visits for their families in one day, if needed.”
The expansions and growth over the years have been driven by community needs. When a large provider of women’s health services stopped offering prenatal care, PHS saw a need for OB-GYN services that wasn’t being met in Butler County.
Now, PHS offers both prenatal care and supportive group meetings that help create cohorts of expecting mothers to talk about their pregnancies and form connections.
“Our approach is that of integrated medicine,” says Croucher. “We’re looking to find innovative ways to meet our patients’ needs.”
The COVID-19 pandemic created challenges for PHS, as many of their services were temporarily shut down. They continued offering emergency dental services, and they used phone or virtual visits for many appointments, a service that has had sustained popularity even when the shutdown ended.
PHS was very involved in administering COVID-19 testing at the outset, and they even repurposed their Mobile Dental Van to be a mobile testing site. They’re currently raising money to refurbish this van that has already logged tens of thousands of miles on the roads of Butler County, bringing healthcare to people where they are.
As COVID-19 testing became more widely available, PHS has scaled back their testing work, focusing on how to make their health centers as safe as possible with restrictions on maximum capacity and by requiring masks.
“We’re all hoping for a vaccine to address the issue, but for now we have made it safe for people to come into our offices, and we’re ready with telephone and video visits as well,” says Bellisario. “We’re always ready to address the needs of patients.”
Learn more about Primary Health Solutions at myprimaryhealthsolutions.org.