By CRAIG FREILICH

Canton-based Community Health Center of the North Country – already employing 580 employees -- is expanding yet again.

With a total staff that numbered just six people in 1985, and following the recent addition of primary care services in Gouverneur and Malone, CHCNC is now planning to open an Ogdensburg facility.

Providing primary care, mental health services, dental facilities, optometry care and even pediatric orthopedic consultations, CHCNC is continuing its rapid growth serving Medicaid patients, uninsured and under-insured people, and more and more, anyone else seeking primary care.

The growth has been propelled by federal government designation in 2007 as a Federally Qualified Health Center, which gives them special responsibilities and benefits as a provider of primary care services in an underserved area.

It allows them to take on low-income patients and those under-insured and uninsured people and be reimbursed by the federal government at a higher rate than regular providers, such as Canton-Potsdam Hospital and Gouverneur Hospital, can receive.

“A lot of people fall into the zone where they can’t get insurance, but they can still come and see us,” said CHCNC spokesman Ray Babowicz. And he said the need to fill that gap has been increasing.

What are now public clinics began as an effort to provide health care to disabled individuals who had trouble getting the services they needed locally.

When the St. Lawrence County cerebral palsy agency in the North Country was part of the state organization 40 years ago, one of their goals was to help get medical services for clients and their families. The difficulty some disabled clients and their families had at the time was getting treatment without having to travel to Watertown of Syracuse or farther, since many specialty practitioners that are nearby today did not exist in the county then, and the families might not have the resources or ability to hunt down and get to services outside of the North Country. So CPANC went about arranging regular visits by specialists to treat their clients.

They first organized volunteer physicians to treat orthopedic and pediatric issues and before long CPANC received certification as a state Health Department-approved diagnostic and treatment center, and the service grew and began accommodating more people who were not part of the CPANC sphere.

They found as they have grown that there is a community need for the services beyond what the clinic was originally intended to do.

“We all of a sudden seem to be filling that need,” said then CPNC Director Doris Chenier in 2003. “That's how this growth came about, how we came to increase primary care, dental services, optometry. We do physical therapy and psychiatric counseling. But our main focus has always been individuals with developmental disabilities, and always will be.”

In 2003, after several moves, staff expansions and more approvals for medical services, the organization’s staff and the clinic operation were brought together in a new $2.5 million building on Commerce Lane in Canton. But the need for their service continued to grow.

Back then, they employed 320 people, full- and part-time. Now the payroll is approaching 600.

There is the full-time clinic in Canton, called the Community Health Center of the North Country (CHCNC), and services are offered in Malone, Watertown and Gouverneur, and in about a year, they plan to open a center in Ogdensburg.

In Ogdensburg there is a high proportion of low-income, uninsured or underinsured people are lacking primary care, Babowicz said. Many of them are relying on the emergency room at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center to treat conditions that might have been mitigated with early treatment by a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant in an office or clinic setting.

“We want it to be downtown,” Babowicz said. “A lot of people in the Ogdensburg area are in need of the services we can provide and many of these families don’t have transportation to our other locations, so we want it to be convenient,” he said.

“We’re literally trying to fill voids in care,” Babowicz said.