Quality of Care in Free and Charitable Clinics: Creating a Roadmap to Health Equity

Americares Foundation, Inc., Stamford CT

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract Little is known about the quality of care in free and charitable clinics (?FCCs?), which are private, nonprofit organizations that rely on volunteer, licensed clinicians and private donations to provide a range of healthcare services to uninsured and underserved patients at no cost or for a small fee. The nation's 1,400 FCCs serve more than two million patients and provide five million visits each yeari. They are estimated to reach one in every eight uninsured patients who seek care. This application proposes a two-day, invitation-only, in-person conference, ?Quality of Care in Free and Charitable Clinics: Creating a Roadmap to Health Equity,? as a mechanism to reach consensus from a diverse array of stakeholders on a set of quality measures as well as the methods by which to collect such quality data from all FCCs in a centralized, national dataset. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Annual National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics (?NAFC?) Symposium and will take place during the final day and the day after their meeting in the fall of 2018. The conference is endorsed by the leading national and state organizations representing FCCs. This national forum is the first of its kind for FCCs. The overall aims of the conference are to: discuss what is currently known about the quality of care in free and charitable clinics, identify barriers to generating knowledge on a national scale and determine ways to generate sector wide support; connect key stakeholders to reach consensus on a) a set of quality measures; and b) the practical ways to collect such measures, including those needed to address health equity, from FCCs across the United States; and cultivate new working groups to (a) implement the consensus document and b) establish the framework for integrating health equity into quality improvement.