OACHC and AndHealth Partner to Bring In-House Specialty Care + Specialty Pharmacy to Ohio’s Community Health Centers

COLUMBUS, OH – AndHealth announced today its partnership with the Ohio Association of Community Health Centers (OACHC) which creates a statewide Whole-Person Community Care Model for Ohio’s Community Health Centers (CHCs) and the patients they serve. Ohio’s 59 CHCs, which make up Ohio’s largest primary care system, have an efficient pathway to add high-quality, affordable, and culturally competent whole-person specialty care and specialty pharmacy to their services. OACHC and AndHealth have established a master agreement that makes statewide adoption of this critical patient service as cost-effective and efficient as possible by leveraging OACHCs deep expertise, membership scale, and best practices.

The Whole-Person Community Care Model provides CHCs with more patients, more clinical capabilities, and sustainable reimbursement and funding by allowing them to deliver first-line specialty care and pharmacy at the patient’s point of need—in their community at a health center and in their home with convenient virtual options that remove transportation and logistics barriers to fully participating in care.

“AndHealth is a game-changer for CHCs and the patients they so well serve. This partnership will help us expedite specialty access to improve health outcomes and equity, and to reduce costs to the overall healthcare system. The Community Whole Person Specialty Care Model emphasizes the integrity of pharmacy reimbursement for CHCs, and helps them grow their impact with new patients, while creating diversified revenue streams,” said Julie DiRossi-King, CEO of OACHC.

For the past 40 years, OACHC has supported the expansion of the Health Center Program’s innovative model of care that improves access to high-quality, comprehensive care, removes barriers and health disparities, and allows communities to participate in the delivery of their own care. Expansion of the CHC model is critical to meet the needs of our medically underserved populations, who now number 100 million Americans that each deserve access to high quality care.  CHCs have been proven to be our nation’s most cost-effective way to meet the needs of this population, today delivering exceptional care to 32 million Americans—making them collectively our country’s largest primary care system. When equipped with sustainable funding and broad, integrated clinical capabilities, CHCs stand ready to meet our nation’s healthcare access crisis and become America’s solution to achieving health as a human right for all people in this country.

The specialty access crisis threatens all people, but especially the medically underserved population that CHCs serve. Among this population, 70% of patients cite affordability and transportation challenges in accessing specialty care, and 50% of specialty referrals are never even completed. These care gaps leave patients exposed to disease progression, needless suffering, and escalating costs for our healthcare system and have caused our nation’s safety net providers and OACHC to recognize that CHCs can offer specialty care in the communities where patients live—and in the medical home that can best meet the needs of this unique population.

OACHC has come together with AndHealth to make it finally possible to offer community-based whole person specialty care and to solve this access crisis through a fully integrated, in-house specialty care and specialty pharmacy solution that enables CHCs to treat patients ionsite under their sliding fee scale, with convenient access to both virtual and on-premises options for patients. The model is economically sustainable for CHCs and results in better outcomes, lower costs, and new patient growth through community outreach and care coordination with other hospital systems who use CHCs in the Community Whole-Person Care Model as access points to deliver first-line specialty care.

The model allows CHCs to meet the specialty care needs of their existing patients, while expanding the impact they have on their communities through new patients that also need specialty care, or that have been unable to access specialty medications. Lack of access is an all-too-common occurrence in a specialty pharmacy landscape that hasn’t generally been equipped to provide comprehensive access solutions to medically underserved patients, or a sliding fee scale. In aggregate across AndHealth’s partners, 67% of specialty care patients are new to the CHC and had been lacking adequate access to care for their specialty and chronic conditions.

Matt Scantland, Founder + CEO of AndHealth said, “It is an honor to work alongside OACHC and our state’s CHCs to radically improve access and outcomes for patients.  Together, we can achieve our shared dream of health as a fundamental human right we provide to all people—by making CHCs an even bigger, more capable, and more integrated part of our healthcare delivery system, removing barriers to health for more people.”