WICHITA FALLS, TX | by Trish Choate | May 30, 2019
Original article can be found at: https://www.timesrecordnews.com
Community Healthcare Center of Wichita Falls is celebrating its 25th anniversary of caring for medically underserved patients in North Texas, officials said.
Born from a local effort, the nonprofit blossomed from a small facility to six clinical sites 25 years later, aiming to serve insured and uninsured patients with affordable care, officials said.
Community Healthcare Center employees celebrated the center’s 25th anniversary with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday morning.Buy Photo
Community Healthcare Center employees celebrated the center’s 25th anniversary with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday morning.
“We are so excited to reach this threshold,” CHC Chief Executive Officer Allen Patterson said Thursday, May 30. “It’s a big day.”
Patterson spoke at a morning ribbon cutting at CHC’s main campus off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. CHC hosted the event with the Wichita Falls Chamber of Commerce Gold Coats to mark the occasion.
Patterson said the CHC served 29,000 unduplicated patients with 90,000 medical, dental and behavioral visits last year.
“We’ve grown 80 percent in the last two years,” he said.
Patterson said he expects a coming expansions to increase those numbers to around 40,000 patients, totaling annual visits to the facilities to approximately 150,000-160,000.
Community Healthcare Center chief executive Allen Patterson, centered, helped celebrate the center’s 25th anniversary during a ribbon cutting ceremony held Thursday morning.
CHC began as an idea of a group of concerned residents to develop a federally qualified health center for the medically underserved in North Texas, Patterson said.
“Community health centers in general are awesome,” he said. “They were created in the late 1960s by President (Lyndon B.) Johnson.”
The three-part legislative package included Medicare, Medicaid and community health centers, he said.
“It’s difficult to create a federally qualified health center, but this community, they did it. They pulled it off, and Community Healthcare Center opened its doors in 1994,” Patterson said.
The first site was a modular building of about 3,800 square feet with one medical provider and a handful of staff members, officials said.
“Next thing you know, here we are 25 years later, we have six clinical sites, one administrative site, totaling about 84,000 square feet,” Patterson said.
Five of the facilities are in Wichita Falls: CHC at 200 MLK Jr. Blvd., Family Health Center at 1301 Third St., Pediatric Associates at 4420 Kimbell Drive, the Phyllis Hiraki Dental Clinic at 110 Lee St. and the Juarez Medical Clinic at 100A Juarez St.
The sixth location, Family Health Center, is in McKinney.
Today, CHC has more than 40 medical, dental and behavioral health care providers and over 200 support staff members, officials said.
Besides pediatric, obstetrics, family medicine and dentistry services, the CHC offers behavioral health counseling, radiology, a pharmacy, a laboratory and educational outreach, officials said.
While CHC sees residents from elsewhere, the nonprofit organization’s service area includes the following 14 counties: Wichita, Cottle, Hardeman, Foard, Knox, Wilbarger, Baylor, Throckmorton, Archer, Clay Jack, Montague and Wise.
“That’s in large part because this is an amazingly wonderful community, and there’s the need for our services and the support for our services by the community,” he said.
“We feel privileged to have completed our first 25 years and to be looking at our next 25 years based right out of Wichita Falls, Texas,” Patterson said.
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