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Important Health Center Context Fill out this section during your planning process | |
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Internal Characteristics | |
What are the characteristics of your health center? (rural/urban; other demographic variables, use of expanded care team, culture)? | Mercy Care is an urban FQHC and is the only Healthcare for the Homeless designated provider in Atlanta. The organization offers programs and services including primary and preventive health care, dental and vision services, health education focused on chronic disease management and prevention, HIV/AIDS-related services, and integrated behavioral health and substance use programming to thousands of homeless and low-income individuals each year. |
What are the infrastructure characteristics of your health center (use of expanded care team, culture)? | |
How do interventions and/or workflows need to be adapted to ensure health equity? | Our interventions consider patients language, culture, and literacy levels and our teams work to meet patients where they are. |
How complex are the patient interventions to implement (e.g., perceived difficulty of implementation, reflected by duration, scope, radicalness, disruptiveness, and number of steps required)? | The interventions are a continuations of activities and are not far outside of normal practices. |
What are key characteristics of the participating setting(s)? | In 2022, Mercy Care served 15,915 patients in 57,696 visits across seven sites. Of those served, approximately 51% were experiencing homelessness, 45% were Black, 37% were Hispanic, 38% were best served in a language other than English, and 53% were uninsured. Among those for whom we have income data, 82% live at or below 100% of the federal poverty level. |
External Characteristics | |
What external or environmental supports or threats are there? | Supports include new funding for hypertension related activities (as our HRSA NHCI grant period is ending which supported our initial SMBP implementation), community engagement (new Atlanta Hypertension Initiative convened for the first time 10/24 hosted by ARCHI with representation from AMA, Live the Beat, and other community partners), and new leadership at Mercy Care (new President and CMO onboarded in the last few months). Threats may include retention of staff, burnout, competing priorities for providers to address for patients (especially SDH related, stress), patient satisfaction related to scheduling and wait times (may affect patients returning for follow-up visits). |
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