Crossroad Health Center - OTR

Erin Garfield, Summer 2015

This summer, I learned a lot about the “business of medicine” and nonprofit work. I worked at Crossroad — Over-the-Rhine with the Quality Improvement team for the majority of my summer. Crossroad is a nonprofit community health center that accepts all patients, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or ability to pay. Crossroad keeps its doors open through federal grants and grants from other organizations. As an intern, part of my job was to review patient-centered medical home standards to see what policies Crossroad was missing so that they could create new policies to meet these standards for their next large grant application.

Another exciting project that I worked on was changing the appointment reminder system with the help of InXite Health Systems, a health technology company based in Columbus. When I began this summer, the appointment reminder system that Crossroad used was calling each patient manually to remind them of their appointments for the following day. This proved to be an inefficient system over the years, because many times Crossroad could not get in touch with the patients. A majority of Crossroad's patient population has cell phones that were provided by the government, commonly referred to as “Obama-phones” by many people. These phones have a limited number of minutes per month, so patients often don't answer the phone when Crossroad is calling. Maria Lukas-Asbury, my supervisor for the summer, found InXite at a health conference and thought that they could help to make a big difference in the health center's abnormally high no-show rate. The “Obama-phones” can receive an unlimited number of texts, so Maria thought it would be a good idea to text patients about appointment reminders instead of calling. InXite worked with all of us at Crossroad for the summer to make this happen; during my second to last week of my internship, the new system finally began. Though there are still some kinks to work out, many of the providers had 0 no-shows during the week that the text reminders were sent, something that was unheard of at Crossroad under the old system.

In addition to this project, I helped an undergraduate intern to plan a parent-child program that could happen at Crossroad every week. The class would focus on parent-child bonding, and emphasize the importance of reading to your child. One study showed that low-income children hear 30 million less words by the age of 3 than children who are more privileged. Many people underestimate the importance of reading to children from birth, but this class would emphasize this point, and help to build parents' confidence in reading to their kids, too. This is an ongoing project that we will continue throughout the year. We have a few obstacles in our way at this moment, so we hope that the class will be up and running by January. Overall, my summer experience taught me about how frustrating, yet rewarding, non-profit work can be. I plan to go into primary care, so the shadowing opportunities that I had during my time at Crossroad were beneficial to me by allowing me to better understand the needs of low-income patient populations.