Local hospitals are working with nonprofit Christ Clinic to provide better care for uninsured Katy-area residents.

According to health officials, there are 1,048,057 uninsured residents in Harris County and 102,569 in Fort Bend County.

Since opening in 2000, Christ Clinic on average treats 300 uninsured patients a month for ailments ranging from high blood pressure to the common cold. The clinic is able to treat patients at a reduced cost because of a staff of volunteer doctors, nurses, podiatrists and pharmacists who, in 2014, donated $111,580 worth of treatment to the clinic.

A $162,000 grant from the Harris County Health Alliance has enabled Christ Clinic to extend its hours and see patients who otherwise would have gone to an emergency room to be treated.

The new aftercare clinic is open Monday through Thursdays from 3–7 p.m.

"We're trying to divert patients from using emergency rooms as a system for care when there are other options in the community for them such as Christ Clinic," said Dianne Arms-Signore, Harris County Health Alliance representative.

Patients are referred to the new aftercare clinic by its two partner hospitals, Memorial Hermann Hospital and Houston Methodist West Hospital, Christ Clinic Executive Director Kara Hill said.

The right place to be treated

Uninsured patients with slightly larger incomes than those treated at Christ Clinic will be referred to two other low-income clinics, Spring Branch Community Health Center in Katy and Access Health in Richmond, officials said.

"If you go to Memorial Herman and you have no insurance, they look at you and look in your ear and say, 'This is just an ear infection. This isn't an emergency,'" Hill said. "They tell the patient that they can pay them $300 to be treated right there or they can come to Christ Clinic. If you've got no insurance and no income, there's an incentive to coming here. They're not turning people away, they're just saying, 'This is not an emergency, why don't you go there instead?'"

At Houston Methodist West, patients are not medically screened before they are treated, but emergency room visitors without insurance are referred to the clinic for follow-up visits, Hill said.

"If they get stitches at Houston Methodist West, they'll come here to get them out after a couple of days," she said. "If they get put on medication for high blood pressure, they'll come here after for a check-up.

"Usually, patients like that are told to schedule a visit with their primary care provider in three to five days after their emergency room visit, but if you don't have one, that's a challenge. Without insurance, visiting a doctor is a challenge, so we do that for them."

Sherry Nelson, Houston Methodist West director of quality and clinical effectiveness, said the hospital is working to educate its uninsured patients on the benefits of going to Christ Clinic.

"Health care is too expensive, and part of it is that you've got to know how to use those dollars wisely," Nelson said. "As consumers, we all have to be educated about it. Emergency room care is the most expensive type of care there is, so the biggest element is getting people to understand where to go for the appropriate care no matter what their payment source is.

"Even if you have the best insurance in the world, you should go to your primary care doctor or an urgent care clinic for minor care, and an emergency room should really only be used for emergent, severe-crisis types of care."

Nelson said the Christ Clinic's aftercare program has the potential to significantly decrease emergency room wait times.

"Particularly for the working poor, you don't want to miss work to go to the doctor's office, so having some place that has some evening hours is definitely going to help," she said. "As people get to know that it's there, I think it has the potential to decrease wait times in the emergency room."

The grant will fund the clinic's aftercare program for a year but through fundraising Hill said she hopes to keep the program running long after that.

The clinic also has plans to apply for three additional grants to obtain the funds to sustain the program, she said.

Program benefits

Another significant benefit of the program is a decrease in costs of health care for the uninsured, Hill said.

"It costs $800 to $1,500 per visit of an uninsured person to an emergency room. Here, they can be treated for $80," she said.

Patients of the clinic are only asked to contribute a minimum of $20 to the cost of their health care, an amount most of its low-income patients are comfortable with spending, Hill said.

"We ask for at least a $20 contribution, but if they are not able to pay that, we can waive it," she said. "We find that a lot of our patients can come up with something, and many of them see it as an investment in their health care because they know they're getting good service here."

Within the first month of the aftercare program, the clinic saw almost 100 new patients, Hill said.

"Before, we just accommodated referrals into the schedule, and it was OK getting started, but having walk-ins created a busy day for us," Hill said. "This grant allowed us to have a spot for those walk-ins and work more closely with these patients."

One of the clinic's new aftercare patients was found to have a potentially deadly heart condition, Hill said.

"We had a patient come to us who had been in and out of emergency rooms several times in the past couple of years. She [was] young but complaining of chest pain," Hill said. "We saw her and did an EKG, and our nurse practitioner didn't find anything but referred her to Spring Branch Community Health Center. Our medical director was reviewing her charts and found some things that made him believe she had a cardiac condition that young people die from all the time."

The clinic's medical director was able to confer with physicians at Spring Branch Community Health center who were able to confirm the diagnosis, Hill said.

"This condition is easily treatable by a cardiologist but because she was in and out of the emergency room and didn't have the primary care she needed, no one was able to check on these things for her because that's not how emergency rooms are set up," she said. "We're very proud that we were able to get her to a cardiologist and get the care she needs."