December 7, 2012 -- Central City Concern’s Old Town Clinic has been identified as an “exemplar practice” by a new national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Primary Care Team: Learning from Effective Ambulatory Practices (the LEAP Project). The Old Town Clinic is one of up to 30 primary care practices that are being selected for this distinction, out of hundreds of practices that were nominated by national experts and rated by a National Advisory Committee.
The goal of the LEAP Project is to identify and share innovative staffing arrangements that make primary care more accessible and effective for patients. A LEAP team will conduct a three-day site visit during the month of January 2013 to understand how Old Town Clinic’s primary care teams deliver high quality, patient-centered health care. The exemplar practices will then join together in a learning community to share best practices and distill their innovations into training and technical assistance materials that can be used by others.
Rachel Solotaroff, Medical Director of Central City Concern and a primary care physician at Old Town Clinic for the past six years, said “Academic literature has little information on this topic, especially on developing effective teams, so the concept is to learn instead from best practices. The final product will be a technical assistance guide for other practices undergoing healthcare transformation. We are extremely pleased to have our teams recognized and our model used nationally in this way.” Dr. Solotaroff is also Assistant Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, at Oregon Health & Science University.
Central City Concern has operated the Old Town Clinic, a federally qualified health center, since 2001. Staff from Central City Concern has been involved in the formation of Coordinated Care Organizations in the state of Oregon over the past year and Dr. Solotaroff currently serves on the Chief Medical Officer Work Group for Health Share of Oregon. Old Town Clinic serves upwards of 4,000 patients annually and employs 75 people.
Central City Concern’s mission is providing comprehensive solutions to ending homelessness and achieving self-sufficiency. It serves approximately 13,000 people yearly with healthcare, housing and employment.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the United States' largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care; it is based in Princeton, New Jersey.
