fbpx
Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘events’

Reach 10,000 Patients Annually Across All Programs: 3

In our Strategic Plan we stated that we’d increase patient capacity by 40%. Knowing the importance of this comes with understanding the lack of specialty care in some of the most at-risk neighborhoods throughout the greater Chicago area. By increasing our patient capacity, we are creating systems, programs and avenues to assist with closing the gap as it pertains to access to quality care, with the goal being to reduce health disparities, increase health equity and level the playing field in availability of care. In an effort to reach this goal, Mobile Care will continue with the tried and true method of adding new school sites as well as resurveying current school populations for new patients and further removing the barrier of location and transportation by permanently offering virtual visits as an option. We have also added additional services like physicals and immunizations, partnered with Howard Brown Health to meet the demands of COVID-19 testing and vaccinations in addition to performing HIV testing in partnership with Howard Brown Health. We’ve worked with PerfectVision to deliver no cost eye exams and glasses to kids and most recently we’ve partnered with UIC to address the opioid crisis. All of these efforts have greatly expanded our reach. Using some of the tactics above we are diligently working to bring our unique patient (for asthma) volume up to 1,200 by the close of the current fiscal year. When this is accomplished, more families across the Chicagoland area will have received high quality care to address various needs. Thousands of kids will have reduced their trips to the ER, hospital stays and school absences related to asthma/allergies and, hopefully, have a better quality of life. 

-Kamari Thompson, Director of Patient Services

Children with untreated chronic conditions experience increased school absenteeism and poorer performance in school compared to their peers. Children with untreated chronic conditions use expensive ERs and hospitals for medical care at triple the rate of other children. The vast majority of preventable emergency department visits among children, as well as negative health outcomes and cost, are being shouldered by economically disadvantaged parents who have children with chronic health conditions. This cannot be a reality we allow ourselves to accept. 

Mobile Care Chicago’s Board and staff are committed to maintaining healthcare access for the thousands of people who came to us for the first time during the pandemic, but doing so will mean substantially increasing our clinic capacity. I feel very fortunate to report that, thanks to our many individual and grantmaking supporters, this expansion is already well underway. We’ve dramatically expanded our clinic staff (from 13 staff in the first year of our Strategic Plan to 20 staff currently), and we’re going to be hiring more positions in 2022. Our ultimate goal is to serve over 10,000 children annually across all of our programs by the end of 2023. Just as important, however, is to use this opportunity to streamline our protocols and make it easier to scale beyond 10,000 children in the years beyond. There are tens of thousands of children in and around Chicago lacking necessary medical and dental care. As an organization nationally recognized for its ability to reach and effectively treat people in need, we must do everything possible to drive the health clinics people need to their neighborhoods quickly and consistently. I’m excited to implement our plan through 2023—I know many lives will be changed for the better because of this effort.

Matt Siemer, Executive Director

Create Open Booking for All Programs (patients can make their own appointments): 2

Patients currently make appointments on Mobile Care Chicago’s clinics in one of three ways: First, they can add their name to a school list when our clinic date is announced; second, they can call our Patient Services department and have the scheduling team manually add an appointment into the schedule; or third, they will get a call from Patient Services reminding them that they’re due back. Fielding calls, tracking due-backs in excel, and keeping separate lists for each school is, to understate the issue, cumbersome and opaque to our patients (and our partners). Yet each clinic we operate has its own unique rotation of community locations and its own rotation schedule, so most traditional online scheduling systems are overmatched by our 150+ clinic locations.

Through our Strategic Plan interviews, our patients asked us to think about the bigger picture: the role automation can play in patient outreach and empowerment. Parents may sign their child up to visit the Dental Van weeks before their child’s dental appointment, but they don’t receive an automated reminder the day before the Dental Van will be at their school. Asthma patients, by contrast, do receive regular reminders of their appointments, but if someone can no longer make their asthma appointment, their only option to modify their appointment is via phone call, something that can be hard for parents while they’re at work. A lack of automated reminders and web-based scheduling assistance may have been ok when MCC was managing 3,000 patient appointments annually over two clinics, but now involves head-spinning challenges for a Patient Services department that is coordinating five different clinics and facilitating almost 8,000 patient appointments annually.

Under the Strategic Plan, we will expand Mobile Care’s patient-facing communications and marketing ability, and add communication technology upgrades. Though we’ve done quite a lot of work in this area, the reason we score this a 2 out of 5 is because of the complexity of the challenge. We’ve determined that when it comes to open booking, we need to start with vetting new electronic health record databases (EHR’s), and through that process we hope that one of two things will happen: either we find an EHR that has an open booking function built into it, or the EHR is compatible with a scheduling system that functions almost like a customer relationship manager (or is a CRM). 

We’ve narrowed down our top EHR’s, and we’re talking with sales reps (everyone’s favorite job). From there, we will choose a few of the best EHR’s, demo them with our Patient Services team, and build out a universal scheduling framework so patients can be updated on their appointment times and make changes to their appointments. When open booking is implemented, patients will have many more tools to track and modify their appointments. Patient Services will have a less complex workflow and can scale to assist a higher volume of patients more easily, and MCC can confidently achieve its goal of expanding to 10,000 patients served by the end of 2023. 

-Rachel Lessing, Communications and Development Manager

Join our first Happy Hour at O’Brien’s Bar and Restaurant

Help Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation welcome new CEO Tim Egan and raise money to help children with asthma on Tuesday, October 8th, 2013 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at O’Brien’s Restaurant and Bar!

obriens logo

  • Meet new CEO Tim Egan
  • Be the first to hear about MCF’s newest idea to innovate children’s healthcare in Chicago
  • Enjoy an open bar, hors d’oeuvres, and free valet parking

 

ADVANCE TICKETS ARE NOW CLOSED. Tickets are available at the door for $100 each..

.

O’Brien’s Restaurant and Bar is at 1528 N. Wells St., just off Wells & North. And don’t worry–we’ll do the parking!

Sponsored in part by

Novak Construction

                                       Ameren Illinois        Tropical Optical

Cristina Foods, Inc. | Sonrisa Dental | Concord Group
Chicago Irish Brotherhood | EM Distribution

Learn more about Tim Egan, and Mobile C.A.R.E.’s new direction

 

Walk for Lung Health on September 22nd

Mobile C.A.R.E. staff, patients, and board members are joining our lung health allies for the annual Hike for Lung Health on Sept. 22nd, and you’re invited!

Take a gorgeous walk through Lincoln Park, and know that you’re making a difference in the fight against lung disease. All proceeds from our walkers will support the ongoing work of our Asthma Vans.

Signing up is easy—just go to our Team page (at this link) and click “Join Our Team.”

Busy on that day? You can also support for our team financially. Just go to our Hike team page, and click “Make a Team Donation.” Fill out the necessary information, and your donation of $5 or more will go directly toward helping low-income children breathe easy this year.

You can choose to complete either a 1 or 3 mile walk. Pack a sack lunch and join us afterward for the Family FunFest. In the past the fest has included a bouncing castle, a magician, the Jesse White Tumblers, and live music. This is a fun time the whole family can enjoy, and all monies raised go toward organizations fighting to improve conditions for people suffering from lung disease.

Mobile Care Chicago