Health First Community Health Center is a non-profit community health center and federally qualified health center. We began operations in March of 2010 in Providence, KY. We now operate 8 locations in Caldwell, Daviess, Henderson, Hopkins, Mclean, Union and Webster counties. We served approximately 14,890 patients with a total of 48,941 visits for the year of 2021.
What is a Community Health Center? Health centers provide high quality preventive and primary health care to medically underserved and uninsured people. Approximately 1 in 12 people in the U.S. relies on a HRSA-funded health center for medical care.
Nearly 1,400 health centers operate approximately 12,000 service delivery sites in the U.S. These health centers employ more than 170,000 staff who provide care for nearly 27 million patients. For millions of Americans, including some of the most vulnerable individuals and families, health centers are the essential medical home where they find services that promote health, diagnose and treat disease and disability and help them cope with environmental challenges that put them at risk.
How does our Health Center Work?
According to federal regulations, we must:
- Serve a medically underserved population,
- Provide appropriate and necessary services with fees adjusted on patients’ ability to pay (referred to as the sliding fee scale),
- Demonstrate sound clinical and financial management, and
- Be governed by a board, a majority of which includes health center patients (51%).
We receive Health Center Program grant funding that, on average, constitutes about 25 percent of our operating revenue. The remainder comes from Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance, patient fees and other resources.
For more information on the HRSA Health Center Program, visit bphc.hrsa.gov.
