Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County

The Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County (PCC) was founded in 1993 as a private, non-profit, charitable organization, whose vision is that all county residents have the opportunity to live healthy lives, and that Montgomery County will be the healthiest community in the nation, serving as a model for providing access to high-quality and efficient care for all.  Since then, the PCC has grown from a handful of dedicated volunteers to the robust organization of today, with a staff of 70, a 24-member all volunteer board of directors, and a growing number of collaborators and community and academic partners.

Historically, the PCC has served as an advocate for county residents without insurance or the resources to pay for health care, and has proven to be an efficient administrator of gap-filling programs for Montgomery County.  These long-standing programs include Project Access (beginning in 1995), Healthcare for the Homeless (1996), and Care for Kids (1998).  Since 2005, the PCC has administered Montgomery Cares, a public/private partnership that is tasked with providing primary and preventive health care to 40,000 low-income, uninsured county adult residents by the year 2010.  Montgomery Cares patients receive health services at one of the eight independent nonprofit clinic organizations known collectively as Community HealthLink..

To these eight primary care Community HealthLink clinic organizations, PCC brings infrastructure in the form of an open-source, Web-based electronic health record now shared among clinics at nearly 50 sites; a medicine-access program that provides clinic patients with low-cost generic medicines and free medicine from the pharmaceutical industry’s patient assistance program; management of a private-practice physician network that provides specialty care to the clinics, and coordination of a multi-clinic patient diabetes disease management initiative.

The eight primary care Community HealthLink clinic organizations will provide sites for implementing Project 1: ” Partnering with Community Health Centers to Prevent ECC” under the supervision of Dr. Norman Tinanoff, Co-Principal Investigator for Project 1 and chair of the pediatric dentistry department at the University of Maryland.