SCOTT DEPOT, WV | by John Dahlia Business Editor | March 26th, 2018
Original article can be found at: https://www.wvnews.com/
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SCOTT DEPOT — You could say Dr. Martha Carter has discovered the secret of success when it comes to providing community health care.
“I learned a long time ago how to recognize a need and find an opportunity to fill that need,” said Carter, CEO of FamilyCare Health Centers.
Carter is co-founder of FamilyCare Health Centers, serving 30,000 people at 11 locations in Putnam, Kanawha, Boone and Cabell counties. But in the beginning, it served only one part of the population.
“We started out as a women’s health service,” Carter said. “I took a job in 1986 at the birth center where low-risk women can go and have their babies.”
Carter, originally from Cincinnati, worked as a registered nurse and certified nurse-midwife at the WomenCare Women’s Health and Birth Center in Hurricane until 1989 when she co-founded FamilyCare.
“It was pretty easy to see that women needed more than just women’s health care,” she said. “So, I started looking at all the aspects of health care that were needed.”
But for Carter, her dream of providing quality, community health care began to take shape in 1997 when FamilyCare went from a women’s health only organization to a family practice.
“We really listened to what people said they needed,” she said. “There’s a lack of dental services. There’s a lack of behavioral health help services. There’s a lack of addiction services. We hear that from our patients and we hear that from our board.”
Listening and learning helped FamilyCare grow in an organic way, Carter said. The needs of patients quickly evolved into an opportunity for FamilyCare to open clinics from Madison in Boone County to Barboursville and Charleston. FamilyCare also has two mobile units — one providing health services for all Putnam County schools, and the “Miles of Smiles Mobile Dental Unit” providing dental needs to schools and other locations.
“We’re about to open a school-based health center at West Virginia State University,” she said. “Our mobile unit is going there a day a week, but we plan to have a regular presence, five days a week.”
“Some other health centers have chosen to have their own pharmacies, and I think that’s fine,” she said. “But we’ve chosen to work with the community pharmacies, so we contract with them to dispense our medications.”
Along with supporting local business, FamilyCare has also grown to be one of the Metro Valley’s largest employers; — an achievement Carter is proud of.
“The other thing that’s personally satisfying is that we’ve created a lot of jobs,” she said of the 250 people working at the 11 FamilyCare Health Center’s.
One of those employed by FamilyCare is the medical director, Dr. Mary Buffington Jenkins, who was hired by Carter a little more than 16 years ago.
“It’s grown quite a bit,” Jenkins said. “We were just opening our second site in Charleston and we just grown from there.”
Jenkins said one of the advantages of having Carter as a CEO is her unique background as mid-wife and clinician.
“She really understands the patient side of things,” Jenkins said. “She really wants to be an advocate for the patients because she was on the front lines taking care of patients in the past.”
Her passion for community health care has not gone unnoticed. In May 2017, she was named by the U.S. government to serve on the Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) Payment and Access Commission.
The MACPAC is a non-partisan agency that provides policy and data analysis and makes recommendations to Congress, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the states on a wide array of issues affecting Medicaid and CHIP. MACPAC serves as an independent source of information on Medicaid and CHIP, publishing issue briefs and data reports throughout the year to support policy analysis and program accountability.
“Being appointed to the MACPAC is an incredible honor and opportunity,” noted Carter. “What I bring is the community perspective. The perspective of being a women’s health practitioner.”
Carter, who is married to Will Carter and has three daughters and two grandchildren, said her success is closely tied to a fundamental desire to make a difference, perhaps one patient at a time.
“My story isn’t just about growing FamilyCare,” she said. “It’s really a West Virginia success story that a person ambitious enough to want to make a difference can figure out what’s needed and build networks to help create a structure that helps fill a need.”
NCWV Media Business Editor John Dahlia can be reached at 304-276-1801 or by email at jdahlia@ncwvmedia.com.
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