PORT ANGELES — Since it was founded in 2015, North Olympic Healthcare Network has tripled the number of patients who walk through its doors and has almost five times as many employees, has expanded its services and opened a second clinic, and yet the nonprofit is still in growth mode, according to its CEO.
NOHN works to meet the increasing demand for primary medical care in the community, CEO Mike Maxwell said at Nor’wester Rotary’s meeting on Friday.
NOHN was established because the private practice model of medical care in a rural area was no longer working to adequately serve the needs of the community, he said.
“In 2014, if you didn’t have a doctor, you were not going to get a doctor,” Maxwell said. “It did not matter what your insurance was, there just were not enough primary care providers around. That was the drive for why we made this change. Our goal was trying to solve that problem and improve access to comprehensive primary care.”
As one of 27 Federally Qualified Health Centers in Washington and 1,400 around the country, NOHN is responsible for responding to the needs of its community by providing affordable health care to underserved and underinsured.
“We will see anybody regardless of their ability to pay,” Maxwell said. “Charges are reduced based on a sliding fee scale so we make sure that all health care is affordable and, if you qualify, for no charge at all.
“We’ve been able to take on 11,500 new patients since 2016 and these are people who had previously knocked on doors and been turned away,” he continued. “We take on another 150 to 200 patients a month and the need is still there.”
In 2022 alone, NOHN had 57,000 patient visits. About 30 percent of its patients are on Medicaid, 35 percent are on Medicare, 30 percent have private insurance and the remainder have no insurance at all.
“We are a safety net for the uninsured,” Maxwell said.
In 2019, NOHN opened a dental clinic at 933 E. First St. that provides services on a sliding fee scale and accepts Medicaid, which few area dental providers accept because of its poor reimbursement rate, he said.
The clinic already has had an impact, Maxwell said, by treating patients with conditions like tooth decay, dental abscesses and pain and keeping them out of the hospital emergency room.
NOHN’s 13,000-square-foot Eastside Health Center at 1026 E. First St., which opened in March, enabled it to expand its primary care provider staff and offer such new services as telehealth and optometry.
Maxwell said an important element of NOHN’s efforts to improve health care delivery has been done by collaborating with other stakeholders in the community.
It partnered with the Port Angeles School District in 2021 to bring medical and behavioral health care to the district’s campuses with a mobile health clinic that sees students for everything from sports physicals to behavioral health.
And it established a three-year residency program with Olympic Medical Center and Swedish Hospital that will hopefully persuade new clinicians to remain in the area after they complete their rotation in Port Angeles.
That is because, almost nine years after NOHN began, it has continued to be difficult to attract and retain health care employees — from medical providers to support staff, Maxwell said.
It will need to add 20 to 25 positions to become fully staffed at 170 employees — about five times as many as the 35 it had when it started 2015.
But Maxwell said the COVID-19 pandemic and the area’s tight housing market had compounded the challenge of building its workforce.
“We lost two of our medical assistants because their landlords converted their rentals into Airbnbs,” Maxwell said. “We try to provide living-wage jobs, but when the cost of living is so high, there’s only so high we can push wages before we go under.”
It has an immediate need for medical doctors and physicians assistants, he said.
“Ideally we’d hire five people tomorrow,” he said.
And the need for more providers is only going to increase as the area’s population increases.
“I’ve seen a range of projections about what that growth is going to be,” Maxwell said. “We’re saying we just need more, it’s that simple.”
Also among the Nor’wester Rotary were the Top 50 outstanding eighth-grade students from Stevens Middle School who were honored at the meeting. They included Keira Brown, Abraham Brenkman, Abby Blaine, Lauren Edwards, Hannah Hairell and Jillian Ramey.
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached at paula.hunt@soundpublishing.com.
