By CRAIG FREILICH

After recently expanding to provide primary care services in Gouverneur and Malone, Canton-based Community Health Center of the North Country (CHCNC) is now planning to expand to Ogdensburg.

“We have a building in mind and we’re in negotiations to close a deal,” CHCNC spokesman Ray Babowicz said.

“We want it to be downtown. 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 not looking to build, but buy an existing building and renovate, and locate where some of the people who will use our services but don’t have transportation can still get care,” said CHCNC Executive Director Anne Richey. “We want to have an impact in the city and be readily available.”

Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center officials as well as other practitioners and community leaders say they are delighted.

“There is a documented unmet need of quality, affordable primary care services for the Medicaid and uninsured population in the Ogdensburg area,” wrote CHMC President and CEO Nathan Howell. “Moreover, we also experience high emergency room utilization, as well as high rates of preventable disease,” both of which a provider of primary care services will likely help mitigate with regular preventive attention.

“Working with CHCNC’s designation as a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), I believe that we have the ability to meet our needs and improve healthcare outcomes,” Howell wrote in a letter to CHCNC Director Richey in February.

As they have grown, CHCNC met the rigorous standards and acquired certification as an FQHC in 2007.

“By having an FQHC in the area, these numbers will surely be reduced,” Howell said.

CHCNC’s Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) designation, given to not-for-profit community-based clinics in medically underserved areas around the country that offer primary and preventive care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay, also makes it more economical for them to offer services to underserved populations since they can get grants and higher reimbursement rates for treating some patients than hospitals and doctors can generally take advantage of. And while their services are primarily intended as a safety net for people of modest means who might not be able to afford care, all are welcome to see them for care.

The expansion into Ogdensburg has also been encouraged by Assemblywoman Addie Russell, who said she believes the new facility will improve access to care and cut preventable disease, and by Ogdensburg Mayor William Nelson, who said that “not only would it increase primary care capacity in this underserved area and transform the health delivery system into a more patient-centered one, but it will promote economic growth and improve the infrastructure within the Ogdensburg community.”

And United Helpers CEO Stephen Knight said CHCNC’s presence will “help address our community’s historic need for affordable, accessible and coordinated care.”

CHNC Babowicz said they are planning on opening in Ogdensburg the second quarter of 2016, about a year from now.

Begun as an arm of Cerebral Palsy of the North Country to help bring medical specialists to the North Country from Syracuse and elsewhere to provide health services mainly to disabled people, over the years it has expanded in response to patient demand and, most recently, to requests from and with the support of other medical practitioners in Gouverneur and now Ogdensburg.

They provide primary care, dental care, physical therapy, optometry, psychiatric and counseling services at their Canton facility on Commerce Lane; primary care, psychiatry and counseling at a Malone facility; and optometry and foot care at a Jefferson County clinic. And they have opened a facility in Gouverneur.

As Gouverneur’s E.J. Noble Hospital was tottering on the brink of permanent closure early in 2013, Canton-Potsdam Hospital redubbed it Gouverneur Hospital and brought the facility into its new company, St. Lawrence Health Services.

“C-PH, because we were an GQHC and a safety net provider, invited us to step in to provide primary care services there,” said CHCNC chief Richey. “It was an exciting opportunity to partner with other organizations in the community to provide quality health care,” she said.

Richey, who has been with CP of the North Country for nearly 30 years, said the expansions are “not to develop properties and services for the sake of doing that. If there’s a gap, or there doesn’t seem to be enough of the kinds of service we can provide, we’re willing to step in partner where it’s needed. Gouverneur is a good example.”

So CHCNC was brought in to aid the effort to revive medical care in Gouverneur by covering primary medical services – the kind of thing you would go to your doctor for rather than waiting and finally taking it to an emergency room. Now they have a permanent facility at 77 W. Barney St. in Gouverneur with practitioners of primary care, foot care, women’s examinations and cancer screenings, taking some of the strain off of the old hospital’s menu of responsibilities, and alleviating some of the same concerns expressed by Howell in Ogdensburg.

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

Babowicz said he did not see much of an effect on CHCNC by the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – other than possibly increasing the need for health centers in the North Country like CHCNC, “because a lot of people might still fall into the zone where they can’t get insurance, but they can still come and see us.” Those people pay on a sliding fee scale depending on household size and income.

Richey also emphasized that her staff are also qualified to help people look for insurance, and to advise people who have insurance through the ACA or the insurance exchanges if they might still qualify for the sliding fee scale, “and pay less out-of-pocket than they would otherwise.”

The Ogdensburg center, in one of the larger communities in the North Country with a large underserved population, is planned to have all the services the Canton center has except physical therapy.