The Fulton County Commission voted Wednesday to spend $6.75 million to build a new public health clinic for poor residents that proponents hope will save far more than the cost in taxes.
The Adamsville Regional Health Clinic, to be built just outside I-285 near I-20, will replace one of the county’s 11 clinics. It will be the third such clinic where residents can get primary care, and it is aimed at a population that suffers disproportionately from health problems, according to a 2009 county study. The others are in Sandy Springs and Vine City.
“The community health centers are usually very busy and of very good value,” said Ken Thorpe, a public health expert at Emory University. “They are of tremendous value because the only place that this population gets health care today is the emergency room at Grady, which is very expensive.”
Grady spokesman Matt Gove said emergency room care drives Grady’s indigent care costs but added it is unclear if clinics do much in cutting such visits. Grady currently operates a network of clinics in poorer neighborhoods in Fulton and DeKalb counties that see 100,000 patient visits a year, but it has not yet seen much reduction in emergency room visits.
“It is really complicated to keep people out of the emergency room,” he said. “You have to make the clinics affordable because you’re talking about a group of patients where $20 for a doctor’s visit is a lot.”
Dr. Patrice Harris, Fulton’s director of health services, said costs to patients will be on a sliding scale. She said the goal was to provide health services that would not only reduce emergency room costs but ensure better access to medical care.
Harris said residents in a five-mile radius around Adamsville are not only poor but often in poor health, with higher mortality rates for everyone from infants to the elderly. That also means its population becomes one of the most costly to treat, with residents are more likely to only go to the emergency room when ill and more likely to end up in intensive care, she said.
“That just reflects that uninsured populations don’t have don’t primary care,” Thorpe said, “and the conditions they have -- diabetes, high cholesterol -- are best dealt with by a primary-care doctor.”
The clinic, which will be at 3712 Martin Luther King Drive, will also provide job counseling, housing assistance, mental-health and dietary counseling and other assistance to reduce stress and help people lead healthier lives, she said.
Harris said the area had much higher rates of hypertension, heart problems and asthma and respiratory disorders.
“It is not enough to eat right and exercise -- you have to have a healthy environment,” she said.
The study suggested that will be a challenge in Adamsville, just southwest of the I-285/20 interchange. Most respondents said they had not used the existing clinic, in part because they did not know it existed. More than one-third said they had no form of health insurance and more than half said a family member had been treated in an emergency room in the last year. The infant mortality rate was 50 percent higher than the rest of Fulton County.
The study also found:
- One- third more babies born in Adamsville were to mothers who had fewer than five prenatal visits, compared to the rest of Fulton.
- Death rates due to cancer are 1.5 times higher in the Adamsville area compared to the rest of Fulton County (and) 17.1 percent of all deaths in Fulton County from 1997 to 2006 due to cancer were in residents of the Adamsville area.
- Death rates due to major cardiovascular disease are 2.1 times higher in the Adamsville area compared to the rest of Fulton County. About 17 percent of all deaths in Fulton County from 1997 to 2006 due to cardiovascular disease were in the Adamsville area.
- HIV deaths are 1.2 times higher in the Adamsville area compared to the rest of the County. About 19 percent of all HIV deaths in Fulton County from 1997 to 2006 were in Adamsville.
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