Why UCD Health specialists will be seeing patients at a Sacramento community health center
As it looks for ways to expand the number of specialty doctors in the Sacrmento region, UC Davis Health is beginning to embed a corps of these medical experts into an Oak Park community health center run by WellSpace Health, the leaders of both companies announced Friday.
“We measure how much time it takes to get an appointment for a Medi-Cal patient versus a Medicare patient versus a commercial patient, and they’re identical,” said Dr. David Lubarsky, the chief executive officer of UC Davis Health. “We do not discriminate in any way, shape or form in providing our subspecialty services. What is a problem is we need to expand our services.”
That’s a challenge, however, Lubarsky said, because Medi-Cal rates pay so little that many specialists cannot afford to set up a practice in an area where they can serve a concentration of those patients. Since WellSpace and other similar networks of community health centers receive federal funding to care for medically under-served areas or populations., Lubarsky said, it makes sense to form an alliance with them.
“That’s why this partnership ... is so important,” Lubarsky said. “As we expand our services and we have a basically 100% Medi-Cal or uninsured, normally that practice wouldn’t be able to stay in business, but because of the structures that the federal government has to support these types of community clinics and the fact that we can ... extend that to subspecialists and basically pay them a living wage in order to see only Medi-Cal and uninsured patients, we can grow this program to meet the needs of the Medi-Cal population.”
WellSpace CEO Jonathan Porteus said the new partnership will increase access to specialty services that are in high demand among Medi-Cal enrollees and the uninsured. For years, Medi-Cal patients have complained that they cannot find a specialist who will accept their government-funded insurance plan.
Porteus said they have found that there are two issues: There are indeed many Medi-Cal patients who need to see specialists, but at the same time, not all those patients actually need to be treated by a specialist.
Over the past 18 months, WellSpace and UC Davis leaders have worked closely to create a referral network that they call Specialty Connect, which will assess patient needs and coordinate specialist referrals not only for Wellspace’s network of 30-plus community health centers but also for six other local health center operators.
The other six are Elica Health; Health and Life Organization, or HALO; One Community Health, Peach Tree Health; Sacramento County Primary Care Clinic; and the Sacramento Native American Health Center, or SNAHC. All are known as federally qualified health centers because they receive funding from federal agencies to provide primary care to Medi-Cal and uninsured patients.
When the WellSpace and UCD team conceived the idea for Specialty Connect, they knew they would have to get approval from the US Department of Health and Human Services to ensure the specialists would receive federal reimbursements. It was a critical element of the work the two organizations did over the last 18 months.
As WellSpace and UCD add specialists in other areas of medicine, Porteus said, they will have to go through a whole process of documentation and certification.
On Friday, WellSpace and UCD Health celebrated their success with an event to mark the addition of the first specialist, Dr. Thomas Abel. He set up shop Jan. 6 at WellSpace’s spacious clinic in the Oak Park Community Center complex at 3415 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Abel, an internal medicine doctor who is board-certified in rheumatology, focuses on diagnosing and treating diseases that affect the muscles, bones, joints, ligaments, and tendons. These diseases can cause pain, swelling, stiffness and, in some cases, joint deformities.
Historically, rheumatology has been a high-need specialty in Sacramento that often requires long wait times and lengthy travel for care, Porteus said, but the new partnership should begin to m
At the Oak Park clinic, Porteus’ team already had seven medical exam rooms, a mammography room and nine dental clinic bays, but they have relocated staff to open as many as 25 additional exam rooms to accommodate Abel and other specialists, other types of providers, and potentially new medical equipment as they identify what incoming providers need to do their work.
Lubarsky said there are a number of subspecialists who really long to do community-level work, and he and his team have been working with smaller health care operators in rural and urban locales to identify places where they can embed these professionals.
“We think that’s another really great role for UC Davis to play, to say, ‘Well, yes, you’re coming to join UC Davis, but you can also do community level work,’” he said. “That’s an actual very powerful draw, and it doesn’t cost us anything to use our reputation to enhance the caliber of people that we can recruit into this community.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
