For employees, One Community Health prescribes trust and innovation: Top Workplaces 2021

For 35 years, Community health has provided medical, dental and mental health care to underserved communities in the Columbia River Gorge, striving to make services accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. The association’s mission has remained the same, but its longevity is maintained through building trust with patients and consistent leadership and staff.

One Community Health chief medical officer Dr Connie Serra said she stayed for 20 years largely because of the long-term relationships she developed with her patients. “This is the first time I am going to deliver the baby of a patient I have delivered,” she said. “I love my patients. It is only a wonderful community in which I work.

One Community Health is the inaugural winner of the Oregonian / OregonLive’s annual Top Workplaces competition, now in its 10th year.

> Here are the 119 best places to work in Oregon and Southwest Washington.

The clinic began with a group of farmers and child advocates in the Gorge who wanted to remove barriers to medical care among farm workers and their families. In 1986, the group opened the clinic, originally called La Clínica del Cariño, in Hood River with the help of a federal grant.

Serving the counties of Hood River and Wasco in Oregon and the counties of Klickitat and Skamania in Washington, La Clínica opened a new site in The Dalles in 2004. The board of directors in 2013 changed the name of the organization in One Community Health to reflect a more inclusive patient list. . Many patients are Indigenous, and well over 50% of patients are supported by Medicaid. The organization also opened a school health center at Hood River Valley High School in 2015.

With now a total of 230 employees at its sites, One Community Health has an operating budget of $ 22.7 million for the current year.

For the organization, building trust with patients begins internally. Her leadership encourages the staff “to not just do the job, but to sit down and really listen to our patients,” said Carmen Oriz, director of the welcome team. “It’s a big change from our previous leaders, who were more focused on numbers and on the dollar basis. “

When Oriz started One Community Health almost 22 years ago, she said employees were often hired into a position without proper training and rarely interacted with management. “My first five years here, I probably saw our CEO twice,” she said.

CEO Max Janasik took over in 2019, after 10 years at Portland-based Cambia Health Solutions, and established a pitch process through which employees could collect data, make a presentation and determine if an idea is viable. .

“It gives you a path that you can follow to present your vision and your dream to leaders,” Serra said. If the organization decides to go ahead with the idea, a project management office brings together a team to make it a reality.

Before the pandemic hit Oregon, Serra offered a massage and acupuncture program that was approved through the pitch process.

Successful employee pitches have also helped make clinic services accessible. Patients previously had to complete a package of almost 30 pages. Staff from several departments came together to determine what was needed to notify patients of a visit and reduced the package to around six pages, “most of which could be electronic,” said human resources director Jennifer Griffith.

Without leveraging all areas of the organization, Janasik said, “you just don’t hear the people who actually do the work”. He said leaders make a point of volunteering at various events, working side-by-side with employees to better understand the issues they face and how leadership can help improve them.

“I’m very keen on everyone sharing their ideas, their challenges, a kind of open environment where people don’t feel like they’re going to be punished for raising a problem or an idea. In fact, we really encourage that because we can’t help solve things that we don’t know, ”he said. “I think in the past people maybe thought there might be some punitive action if they brought up a problem and said, ‘Hey, I need help. “”

This sense of trust extends to the camaraderie among employees. Serra said if she ever leaves town, she knows her patients are in good hands and the staff are there to support each other through a difficult life transition. When Serra’s mother passed away last year, she said her colleagues encouraged her to stay home and made sure they took care of her job.

“We love to go out. We like it when there’s a reunion because we can all see each other, and the other thing is we value work-life balance, ”Serra said. “We really believe in being physically and emotionally healthy ourselves, because we believe that if we are healthy we can be better clinicians. “

Welcoming staff feedback, along with a willingness to address unmet community needs, has contributed to the culture of innovation that has enabled One Community Health growth. “We move easily,” said Oriz. The organization, for example, is currently renovating a mobile medical unit – a recreational vehicle donated by central Oregon health care provider Mosaic Medical – to serve throat patients who might not be able to access clinics, especially during the winter.

Serra said passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was critical to the longevity of the organization. After the recession hit two years earlier, up to 60% of One Community Health patients were uninsured and could not pay for medical care. “Our management at the time did an incredible job of ensuring that resources were spent on enrolling people in Medicaid,” she said. Today, less than 15% of patient visits are uninsured.

Above all, Griffith said One Community Health has been able to continue its services by responding to needs in its community that would not otherwise be met.

“We see a lot of patients without insurance. We see a lot of patients who have been referred from other health or dental or behavioral care providers in the community, often because of mental health issues or just generally poor behavior, ”he said. she declared. “We’re the last stop resource for some people, and I think it’s essential in any community that there is a place where everyone can get care.”

See more coverage of the best workplaces at oregonlive.com/topworkplaces.