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Earlier this month, health center leaders and CHAD staff joined more than 2,000 community health center advocates for the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) Policy & Issues Forum. Health center leaders from around the country – providers, nurses, CEOs, and consumer board leaders – descended on the halls of Congress, sharing their stories and underscoring that long-term sustainability is essential to meet the growing demand for care.
Lexy Eggert, chief development and strategy officer with Horizon Health, participated in the South Dakota delegation, along with CEO Wade Erickson and several board members. In reflecting on the experience, Lexy shared, “It is always a great experience to visit Capitol Hill and have the opportunity to continue building relationships with our elected officials and their teams. Their decisions shape our future and the landscape in DC is constantly changing, so it’s important to keep the needs of our
patients and communities at the top of their minds. It is also inspiring to be among hundreds of other health center leaders coming together as a movement.” On the North Dakota side, Mara Jiran, CEO of Spectra Health, participated along with a board leader.
Together, we advocated for increased health center funding, a stronger workforce, long-term stability for 340B, improved telehealth access, and the vital role Medicaid plays in patient care and reducing long-term costs. We shared about health centers’ proven track record as efficient providers that save the health care system billions of dollars by reducing preventable inpatient hospitalizations and emergency room visits through timely access to primary care.
Shortly after the Policy & Issues Forum, NACHC leaders spoke to C-SPAN about the critical role Community Health Centers play in addressing America's primary care needs. They shared that, despite serving 32.5 million Americans (10 percent of the U.S. population), CHCs only represent roughly 1 percent of our nation’s total annual health care spend.
Health centers have had bi-partisan support for over 60 years, and we continue to work with policymakers to ensure that we can carry out our mission to care for patients. The next several weeks will be critical for continued advocacy, as government funding is set to expire on March 14th. If you haven’t already, subscribe to NACHC’s weekly Washington Update newsletter for the latest advocacy opportunities.
In addition, NACHC has announced a new weekly national call to facilitate immediate response to emerging federal and executive actions, titled the Federal Action Support Team (F.A.S.T.) Call. The aims of the call are to:
- Create a dedicated space for national coordination and communication;
- Share real-time facts and resources;
- Advance understanding of policy and
operational impacts on the community health center program; and
- Connect with NACHC staff and subject matter experts.
Learn more and register here.
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Health
Centers in the News
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Northland Health Center started seeing patients at the Ray Urgent Dental Clinic. They’ll be open on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
North Dakota Monitor featured an article on Senate Bill 2231, supported by CHAD, and its aim to improve access to dental care in North Dakota by adding dental coverage to Medicaid Expansion. Both Nadine Boe, CEO of Northland Health Centers, and Shelly Ten Napel, CEO of CHAD, are quoted in the article.
Sioux Falls Business featured a story on Jaimie Roggenbauer, an up-and-coming public health program manager for the city of Sioux Falls.
Northland Health Centers offer women’s heart health screenings, as featured by KFYR.
Applications are open for Horizon Health’s Build Dakota Scholarships for nursing, medical assistant and dental students for the 2025-2026 academic year.
A community health assessment conducted collaboratively in Sioux Falls, with support from Falls Community Health, found that obesity, substance abuse, and mental health are three top health concerns locally. Results were covered in stories by Dakota News Now and the Dakota Scout.
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340B:
Take Action Today! (Updated Article)
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Yesterday, legislative committees in both North Dakota and South Dakota voted to advance state legislation to protect the 340B drug pricing program from contract pharmacy restrictions. This is a major milestone, and next these bills will have floor votes – likely
both tomorrow. Pharma is fighting hard against these bills, so it is critical that state lawmakers hear from local health care organizations today. If you’d like to contact your legislators today, here is the information. Messages can be short and simple but hearing from constituents really does help.
In South Dakota:
- SB 154 is scheduled for a Senate floor vote tomorrow, Friday 2/21.
- Contact your senators (updated link) to express support for SB 154 and share how 340B helps your patients.
In North Dakota:- HB 1473 will likely have a House floor vote tomorrow, Friday 2/21.
- Contact your house representatives (updated link) to express support for HB 1473 and share how 340B helps your patients.
Created by Congress over 30 years ago, the 340B drug pricing program allows community health centers, rural hospitals, and other non-profit entities to purchase outpatient drugs at reduced prices. Through this program, health centers are able to provide patients with discounts on needed medications. In addition, the program generates savings that allow health centers and other covered entities to stretch scarce federal resources farther to offer a variety of patient services. Since 2020, pharmaceutical
companies have tried to implement restrictions on entities that participate in the program, leading to instability and threatening the ability of providers to ensure patients have access to services and medications they need, especially in rural areas.
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Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month is Coming
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March is just around the corner, and that means it’s time to shine a spotlight on colorectal cancer awareness! Early detection saves lives, and together, we can make a difference by spreading the word about the importance of screening. Stay tuned for upcoming events, challenges, and ways you can get involved—including Turn ND Blue and Blue Up South Dakota photos! Let’s work together to raise awareness, encourage screenings, and keep our communities healthy. Get ready to go BLUE this March!
Turn ND Blue Photo Contest – Join the Fun!
Make a BIG, BLUE impact across North Dakota! Join the Turn ND Blue Photo Contest and help raise awareness about the life-saving importance of CRC screening.
Winners will be recognized at the ND Cancer Coalition Annual Meeting on June 24th and receive a canvas of their photo!
New this year: The public can view and rate photos, so share yours on social media to get your community involved and voting for their favs!
Blue Up South Dakota!
Join the South Dakota Department of Health in raising awareness for colorectal cancer by rocking your best blue outfit this month! Health center members and partners—let’s shine a light on the importance of early screening and prevention.
Let’s turn South Dakota blue for a great cause!
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CHAMPS /
CHAD 2024 Needs Assessment Results
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CHAD, in collaboration with CHAMPS, conducted its annual needs assessment in December 2024, with participation from 100% of the health centers in North Dakota and South Dakota. 77 health center staff contributed, helping CHAD shape training and technical assistance (TA) plans for the upcoming year.
Health centers highlighted key challenges, including staff recruitment, billing/coding/ reimbursement, financial sustainability, competitive compensation, and staff burnout. Billing/coding and financial sustainability concerns significantly increased from 2023, indicating growing financial and operational pressures.
Health centers also identified key training and technical assistance needs in a variety of areas including:
- Service Expansion: Health centers indicated that mental health and dental services are top expansion priorities.
- Workforce Recruitment and Retention: Health centers indicated that their top needs in recruitment and retention include optimizing staff onboarding and education, development of competitive compensation and benefit packages, and human resource recruitment and retention metrics benchmarking. Optimizing staff onboarding and education is a newly identified need in the 2024 survey. Dentists, behavioral health providers, dental hygienists, nursing staff, and administrative support staff were top recruitment needs.
- Leadership Development: Health centers continue to rank effective communication, relationship, trust building, and staff empowerment as leadership development needs.
- Emergency Preparedness: Increased interest in site security, emergency communication, and immediate threat training, reflect heightened concerns compared to previous years.
- Financial Sustainability: Analyzing new revenue opportunities emerged as the top need in 2024, followed by increasing patient visits to meet budget projections, billing best practices, and coding best practices. The choices of
financial sustainability topics received higher prioritization throughout the survey in 2024.
- Operational and Clinical Improvements: Health centers ranked their need for training and technical assistance for improving health outcomes with clinical care as training for support/outreach/CHW staff and establishing and improving chronic care management programs. The top support needed for improving health outcomes with data and technology was utilizing data to plan and manage care. Training for support staff and addressing social drivers of health remain key priorities.
The 2024 needs assessment underscores the evolving challenges and training needs of health centers. CHAD is committed to ensure that the training, TA and resources we develop are aligned with health center needs and priorities. Thank you for your participation in the 2024 needs assessment!
If you are interested in more detailed information gathered in the CHAMPS/CHAD survey, please contact Darci Bultje.
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Register
Today for the Upcoming Wellness Visits Webinar
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Join us for an engaging and informative webinar series dedicated to exploring the critical importance of wellness visits for children and adults. Wellness visits are foundational to primary care, providing essential opportunities to build relationships with patients, identify potential health issues early, implement preventive measures, and enhance overall well-being.
Despite their importance, many patients do not take advantage of these visits. In this series, participants will discover effective strategies that health centers can implement to increase the number of patients who complete routine wellness visits. Additionally, we will explore features within DRVS that can assist in these initiatives, empowering you to elevate the quality of care you provide.
This webinar series is appropriate for clinicians, nurses, quality leads, community health workers, front desk staff and schedulers, billing, and partners.
Session 1:
Pathways to Wellness: Essential Strategies for Well-Child Visits from Birth to 21
Wednesday, March 19 | 1:00 pm CT | 12:00 pm MT
In the first session of our Preventative Power series, we will highlight the importance of well-child visits from infancy to age 21, focusing on their role in disease prevention and health maintenance. The session will include discussion on barriers to completion of well-child visits, as identified in a 2021 study of well-child visits among North Dakota Medicaid beneficiaries. Participants will learn best practices for identifying patients due for well–child visits and explore key measures for tracking
well-child visits from infancy to adolescence to improve care and outcomes.
Session 2:
The Power of Prevention: Enhancing Adult Wellness Visits and Patient Engagement
Wednesday, April 2 | 1:00 pm CT | 12:00 pm MT
Join us for an engaging webinar designed to identify and address preventive care needs for adults, emphasizing the significance of increasing adult wellness visits as a strategy to enhance performance on quality measures, including cancer screenings. This session will highlight the critical role of routine wellness visits for adults aged 22-64 in disease prevention and health maintenance. Discover effective communication strategies to boost patient engagement and learn how to leverage Azara tools to monitor
and improve wellness visit metrics, ensuring comprehensive care and optimized preventive screening rates.
Session 3:
Elevating Preventive Care: Best Practices for Optimizing Medicare Annual Wellness Visits
Wednesday, April 16 | 1:00 pm CT | 12:00 pm MT
Join us for the final session of our series, where we’ll share best practices and communication strategies to encourage more patients to schedule their Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs). These visits are vital for improving preventive care and supporting better health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries.
We’ll outline the key components of the AWV, and you’ll also gain access to tools and resources to assist with the application and implementation of these visits in your practice. Additionally, learn how to integrate Azara into your workflows to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. We’ll cover how to set up reminders, manage recall systems, perform risk assessments, and
monitor quality measures. By the end of this session, you’ll have practical, actionable strategies to boost preventive screening rates and deliver even better care for your patients.
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Nexus
Funding Opportunity
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Nexus SD is a statewide collaboration of health care, human, and social service providers sharing information using an integrated technology platform and referral system to coordinate whole-person care. The vision of Nexus SD is to streamline connection between multi-sector providers to address social needs and drive positive outcomes among populations at higher risk and that are underserved.
In 2024, the South Dakota Department of Health awarded 19 organizations funding to implement Nexus SD to help address social drivers of health. With the success seen through that opportunity, the Department has decided to offer another round of funding!
Application Deadline: Friday, April 11, 2025 at 5:00 pm CT
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North
Dakota Senate Passes Bill for
Medicaid Expansion Dental Benefit
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SB 2231, which would add a dental benefit to North Dakota Medicaid Expansion, passed overwhelmingly on the Senate floor yesterday, by a vote of 44 – 3. Thank you to all the health center leaders who helped tell the story about the need for dental coverage! We will continue to provide updates as the bill moves to the House side. For more information, please contact Kim Kuhlmann at kkuhlmann@communityhealthcare.net.
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Flexible Outreach Documentation Workflow for Care Coordination: ACC New Feature Series
Join us for the next installment of our ACC New Features series for in depth workflow demonstrations of the updated outreach documentation workflows in Azara Care Connect. With this release, ACC users will be able to record outreach efforts for specific gaps in care (e.g., breast cancer screening) rather than just a gap category (e.g., CQM). This new workflow in addition to the updated Coordination Activity Report will allow users to document and report on granular, gap-specific outreach efforts, driving long-term improvement in patient access to care. This webinar is only applicable to those customers already using ACC.
Tuesday, February 25
12:00 pm CT / 11:00 am MT
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Maximizing Efficiency in the Revenue Cycle with DRVS Financial Operations
In this webinar, we will review the various measures available in the Azara Financial Operations Module (FinOps). Participants will learn how they can leverage filters and groupings on measures to identify trends with their revenue cycle workflows to get a retrospective view of their overall performance. Join us as we walk through the life cycle of a claim from patient
arrival to zero dollar. Utilize DRVS tools to drive efficiency within your front and back-end revenue cycle workflows. While these measures are only available if you have the FinOps module, this is an excellent opportunity to explore if this solution is a fit for your center.
Thursday, February 27
1:00 pm CT / 12:00 pm MT
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This account is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of an award totaling
$1,423,637.00 with 0 percent financed with non-governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit HRSA.gov.
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