Capital Link's Blog

 
With the Community Health Center Fund set to expire September 30, 2019, the Lenders Coalition for Community Health Centers (LCCHC) has been working to support its extension. There are currently proposals in both chambers to extend the program for multiple years. 

The LCCHC steering committee has crafted a letter (link below) recommending a four-year extension of the Community Health Center Fund, highlighting the lender’s perspective. This letter has been delivered to the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, and Representative Kevin McCarthy, as the majority and minority leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Read the full letter here.

Capital Link announces the release of an updated statewide financial and operational profile of California Federally Qualified Health Centers, sponsored by the California Health Care Foundation. This resource presents multi-year trends, offering a framework for identifying the financial strengths, challenges, and benchmarks that support opportunities for performance improvement.

Covering the five-year period of 2013 to 2017, this analysis focuses on the following trends for California Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and FQHC Look-Alikes (LALs):

•  Patient and visit growth and expansion of service delivery and capacity

•  Payer mix changes over the review period

•  Financial performance as shown by revenue growth and operating margins

•  Financial health as measured by liquidity and revenue collections

•  Annual patient utilization and practice mix

•  Productivity metrics and quality of care indicators

Click here for a free download of California Federally Qualified Health Centers: Financial & Operational Performance Analysis, 2013-2017.

Over our long history of working with health centers, Capital Link has amassed a database of financial and operational information to develop field-building resources on the factors affecting health center performance, impact, and growth. For more information, visit www.caplink.org.

The nation’s highest performing health centers can be classified as having strong clinical quality as well as financial health, but are there lessons to be learned about their workforce models? Capital Link and the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved (ACU) explored this question in a study examining the workforce and financial characteristics of high-performing health centers to begin to understand the success factors among a variety of staffing models for potential replication.

Developed with support from the Health Resources and Services Administration, Identifying Workforce and Financial Characteristics of High-Performing Health Centers is a report of findings comparing financial and workforce metrics of High Performers against Non-High Performers and median results of Federally Qualified Health Centers nationally to identify effective models for potential replication and areas for further research.

The report highlights the following findings:

• High-performing health centers demonstrated operating margins approximately three times higher than national and non-high performing health centers

• High Performers had nearly three times the cash reserves of Non-High Performers and national health centers, at the median

• Provider mix at the high-performing health centers was comprised of approximately 60% physicians and 40% non-physicians

• A 2 to 1 ratio of primary care support staff to providers for High Performers was higher than peer groups, a finding that supports research on effective team models

• The average tenure for CEOs for High Performers was over 10 years, approximately 60% higher than both peer groups

Further analysis on the influence of workforce models on financial and operational performance would provide additional insight on replicable models. To learn more about the findings, access this new resource here.