Fiscal year 2025 expanded hours. - the wallace medical concern (H80CS24145) DBA wallace has a 40-year history of providing compassionate care for underserved individuals in multnomah county oregon

Wallace began serving a small number of homeless patients in 1984 in downtown portland, oregon and moved to east county to meet the needs for a growing population. After achieving fqhc status in 2012, with phpc special designation, later adding HCH special designation we opened our first dental clinic in 2016. In may 2021, wallace moved down the road to a new downtown rockwood economic development campus where the clinic occupies an entire floor and offers expanded, truly-integrated care. We continue to operate our original dental clinic and a mobile medical clinic that offers student health services at a local high school while we plan to open our brick-and-mortar student health center in fall 2024 in partnership with the gresham-barlow school district. Diving into our service area population, we are located in a more diverse, younger, and lower income area compared to surrounding other cities and area in oregon. Our patients require culturally-appropriate care with 53% of our patient population identifying as hispanic/latino and similarly 45% are best served in a language other than english with the most common language being spanish. Through a patient survey, we learned that patients are interested in expanded hours in the early morning and later evening. Internal data shows that early morning appointments have a higher no-show rate than late afternoon and evening appointments. Therefore, we will be expanding our hours in the evening. These appointment times will improve access for many patients. For example, patient families with one car may be without transportation until after traditional working hours, patients who do not have the ability to take time off work or go unpaid to attend a medical, dental, or behavioral health visit during working hours, and homeless patients who may find scheduling an appointment well in advance to be a barrier to care. We are proposing to extend clinic hours by 2 hours in the evening, monday through thursday, which will provide 16 additional primary care appointments after 5PM each week. We intend these expanded hours to also provide access to more same-day appointments which should decrease unnecessary ED visits and capture new patients who haven't felt the need to seek primary care. Same day appointment availability will increase with the addition of a small team dedicated to same-day care monday through thursday from 11AM - 8PM. We will be able to eliminate the current same-day appointment slot in each primary care provider's schedule and replace IT with a routine primary care appointment. During our expanded hours, we plan to have one full provider team which includes 1 nurse practitioner, 2 medical assistants, 1 interpreter, 1 patient scheduling coordinator, 1 RN, and 1 lab technician. Our 2 behavioral health providers have agreed to shift their schedules to include these extended hours once per week which will provide between 4 and 6 behavioral health appointments after 5PM. For the safety of our patients and our staff we will be hiring a security service to monitor our building, identify and DE-escalate any aggressive behavior, and accompany patients and staff to their transportation if asked. This project will add approximately 1,620 appointment slots per year. Assuming a 25% no-show rate and that 50% of the slots will be used by existing patients, we are estimating up to 406 new patients in 2025 as a result of this project.