Adelante |
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| www.adelantehealthcare.com |
Meet Chamber Premier Member Adelante Health Care. Adelante Healthcare currently operates eight health centers throughout Arizona, offering a wide array of services to patients of all economic backgrounds. Adelante Healthcare remains an important part of the Valley’s health care safety net as they continue to expand their staff, services and locations.
Vital signs
The medicine of tomorrow is here today
Better outcomes, lower costs, greater access. Avein Saaty-Tafoya (left), the chief executive officer of Adelante Healthcare, is changing the conversation about health care in the Valley and pointing the way to what may be a smarter approach to medicine.
Because some recent news stories offer a grim prognosis for the future of the American healthcare system, we sought a second opinion from Saaty-Tafoya (left), who gave us fresh hope for a cure.
“With healthcare reform, the focus of our healthcare system is going to be on primary and preventive care to control costs and to keep patients from suffering complications and negative outcomes,” she says. “As a federally qualified community health center, Adelante Healthcare fits into this picture as a type of environment where anyone can come for care—whether they have insurance, are uninsured or have Medicare or Medicaid. We accept any and all patients. Our payments are based on sliding fees, so patients pay what they are able—based on family size and income.”
For owners of small- and medium-sized businesses, the idea of allowing customers to pay for services based on their budget sounds as alien as TK. But Saaty-Tafoya insists it’s a workable model for nonprofits. “The reason we’re able to make it work is because we have a broad mix of patients and payers. Obviously we can’t serve 100 percent uninsured patients. Because we’re a nonprofit, we don’t have to post great profits like for-profit environments do. We keep our overhead and costs low, we’re very efficient and our cost per patient is very low.”
Amidst the economic downturn, Adelante Healthcare, which now operates eight health centers throughout Arizona, has been growing strong with additional sites and services—yet still struggles to keep up with the demand. “It’s always a challenge to provide enough access to the patients who need it,” she says. “In Maricopa County, low estimates show there are 650,000 underserved patients. We only serve about 30,000 of those patients, and we can’t possible keep up with the demand. There are very few other health centers like ours in the safety net.”
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