‘Find a Clinic’ Function’s a Hit

Medical coalition for the uninsured makes it easier to match needs with services

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Jun 8, 2007

Trying to arrange free health care for the thousands of Portlanders who needed it was difficult enough.

But the umbrella organization for 13 Portland independent health clinics was suffering further complications. There was not enough coordination among the clinics — either to help sick people understand what was available to them at different clinics or to help clinic officials best use the medical professionals who were volunteering to help the sick people.

The umbrella organization — called the Coalition of Community Health Clinics — has found its answer in a high-tech, but simple, tool. The tool is a revamped Web site that gives people information about free health care in the Portland area, and steers people to the clinic that might be best for them.

While the site’s redesign was initially meant to most help representatives of the 13 clinics and other health officials, it immediately became popular with the public at large, coalition leaders say.

“I had no expectation that it would be as useful a tool and as widely used a tool as it is,” said Daniel Heindel, the clinic administrator for the Rosewood Family Health Center in Portland and the new chairman of the coalition’s board.

By May, the third month after the redesign, the Web site, www.coalitionclinics.org, was attracting three times as many visitors as the first month of the redesign.

Last month, 900 people used the “find a clinic” feature on the Web site.

“The public is really using this site,” said Dani Leis, who joined the coalition staff last year to help officials improve coordination among the clinics. “We’re getting a significant number of hits, and the ’find a clinic’ page is the No. 1 page on the site.”

The “find a clinic” page on the coalition’s Web site points out the glimmer of hope within a rather dark reality for people who don’t have health insurance.

That reality is that tens of thousands of Portlanders don’t have health insurance or the money to pay for health care, which means they often get sicker and sicker before they finally end up very sick at hospital emergency rooms.

The glimmer of hope is the free or significantly reduced-cost medical care

that 13 clinics are providing to Portlanders — although they can serve only a fraction of all of the people who need the help. The clinics had 181,000 patient visits during the fiscal year that ended last June, according to coalition officials.

Four months ago, people who found their way to one of the 13 clinics often had to make contact with several of them before they found one that could provide the help they needed, Leis said, adding that often this was because certain clinics provided only some kinds of medical care, or provided help only to people at certain income levels.

Since the new Web site became operational in early March, anybody can now click on the “find a clinic” link, give some basic information about themselves and the help they need, and the site produces a list of clinics that might be able to help.

Meanwhile, the coalition also provides a range of other links and information about other health care resources in Oregon, Leis said.

toddmurphy@portlandtribunecom