AndHealth Partners with PrimaryOne Health to Address Health Inequities by Offering In-House Specialty Care

COLUMBUS, OH – AndHealth announced today its partnership with PrimaryOne Health to bring in-house whole-person specialty care to the communities they serve. PrimaryOne Health supports Franklin County and Pickaway County as the oldest and largest Community Health Center (CHC) in central Ohio. Through this partnership, PrimaryOne Health will now add high-quality and affordable in-house specialty care for dermatology (including psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis), rheumatology (including rheumatoid arthritis), and neurology (including headache and migraine) to its services.

Since 1997, PrimaryOne Health has delivered whole-person care to the medically underserved communities of central Ohio including primary care, OB/GYN, dental, vision, behavioral health, and pediatrics. By partnering with AndHealth, they have added access to an integrated care model that provides convenient, affordable, and high-quality specialty care alongside support for root causes and Social Drivers of Health (SDoH), such as medically tailored meal delivery, support for behavioral health, sleep, movement, remote monitoring, and continuous access to providers and health coaching. This comprehensive, whole-person approach to specialty care enables patients to have better health outcomes and receive care directly within their medical home.

Charleta B. Tavares, PrimaryOne Health CEO said, “I am extremely proud that we have established this critical partnership to expand our clinical capabilities and remove the barriers that prevent patients from accessing specialty care. We recognize that better health outcomes happen when you treat the whole person, including addressing Social Drivers of Health. By layering specialty care into our services, we can now support even more facets of our patients’ health in an accessible, culturally appropriate, and convenient manner.”

Addressing Health Inequities in Specialty Care

Specialty services are critically important to patients, but budget constraints typically prevent them from being offered at Community Health Centers. Most commonly, patients are referred outside of the CHC where they face numerous cost and logistical barriers such as lengthy wait lists due to specialist shortages and specialty care deserts. Nationwide, patients can wait up to a year to be seen by an outside specialist and roughly half of CHC referrals are never completed at all. Collectively, these challenges have led to a specialty care access crisis for medically underserved people.

AndHealth partners with CHCs to solve this access crisis through a fully integrated, in-house specialty care and pharmacy solution that enables CHCs to treat patients in-house under their existing affordable fee schedule, while providing 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. AndHealth’s rapidly growing network of CHC partners now spans Ohio, Indiana, and Massachusetts and has to-date resulted in all patients initiating treatment within 7 days.
This model also helps CHCs close care gaps by expanding their reach in the communities they serve. In aggregate across AndHealth’s partners, 66% of specialty care patients are new to the CHC and had previously been lacking adequate access to care for their chronic conditions.

Matt Scantland, Founder + CEO of AndHealth said, “We are proud to stand alongside PrimaryOne Health to support patients with access to high quality, affordable, and accessible specialty care. Like them, we believe that health is a human right we must provide to all people, and that everyone deserves access to the care they need to be well. For more than 40 years, PrimaryOne Health has been a leader in creating better health outcomes and advancing health equity in our community, and we are so excited to work together to build on this great legacy by providing whole-person specialty care to their patients.”