Welcome to the weekend focus. It's a division of iHeartMedia, a production of iHeartMedia. Today I'm with Kathy Brown, the executive director of the Wheeling Health Rate and Wheeling. And the health rate has a huge history of servicing Brooke O'Hail Marshall, Wetzel, Tyler Counties in West Virginia, and Belmont County in Ohio, I believe.
And so Kathy, what are, make sure that I got the area correct and also can you tell us what the originations of the Wheeling Health Rate and then we'll get into service levels and of course a little bit of your background. Sure, that'd be fine. You are right. We do serve Brooke Hancock, Ohio Marshall, Wetzel and Tyler Counties in West Virginia.
We get a little bleed over from down in the Mont County area. And then we basically serve Belmont County, Ohio. We pick up Bits of Monroe and Harrison just because they're part of the United Way catchment area. So we try to respond to need as needed.
We don't advertise. We don't take a bunch. But we do take some people from there. OK.
And so how do you get the word out? Obviously a program like this will be beneficial. But how do you get the word out to say that not only are our services here, but their minimal cost or zero cost. How do you get that information out?
I've been doing it for ever since I've been there. That was my big challenge to let people know we're there. And obviously I've done a pretty good job of getting out there. But there's still people that don't know.
And I don't know how you do it. What we've done, I public speak all the time. We take brochures and put them everywhere. Halfway houses, residential homes, even the high rises.
We take information there. We take it to the hospitals, to the doctors offices. We're on Facebook. We have a web page.
We do everything we can to let people know. Department of Human Resources. They know that we're a service. We provide Medicaid.
We take care of Medicaid patients. So we've let that out so that people know. We even made big signs that hung on the building to say we're now taking Medicaid back in 2014 with the Affordable Care Act. So what's your, I don't want to say typical, but what is your typical patient that comes?
What do you see that their needs are, if it's not out of the gate financially? So what do you, what's your typical patient look like? Well, our patients are all uninsured and underinsured. With the Affordable Care Act, we've seen a huge increase in people who don't qualify for the 138 and a half percent below, so they don't get Medicaid.
But they can't afford their benefits in the marketplace. They can't afford the deductibles. It could be $7,000, $10,000, $12,000 a year before they start to get anything covered. They can't afford that.
They can't afford the monthly premium. They've tried to address the premium, but the deductibles are tough. But the typical patient works a lot. They sometimes work three, four part-time jobs, or they work at a job that doesn't provide insurance and or they work at a job because of the fact that their income is low.
And if their income is 8%, or, I mean, if the cost of insurance is 8% or higher than what they're making, they don't have to pay. They don't have to buy into that insurance. We see like people that work at Walmart and the fast food restaurants, you know, all over the area. But maybe the person that is at the fast food, the gas station where you run in and grab a coffee and a breakfast sandwich.
Those are the people that we see all the time. They're really hard-working people. They're just the people that continue to fall through the cracks. Right.
So along those lines, I've talked to a few people that have been eligible for Obamacare, or if the Affordable Care Act. But for whatever reason, the threshold, it doesn't cover or explain how it does or does not cover from a prescription standpoint. Well, a lot of medications are not on the Affordable Care. It depends on which plan you take.
And so a lot of them don't cover a particular medicine that you have to have. And in the medical field, if you have a medication that you do well on, and then your insurance changes, and it says, oh, we won't cover that anymore, it's very difficult to make that switch. I mean, if you're diabetic and you're well controlled on land, you don't want to go back to insulin, because insulin's not going to control you. That's just one example.
So it's very difficult. And the drugs that they pay for, for the most part, are the generic medications. And there are some brand names that are the only thing that people can use. For example, theanobarbitol.
If we don't provide that. But you can't take generic. You can't take generic thyroid. You have to have synthroid, or it doesn't work right.
So there's things like that. So it's very frustrating. And it's so complicated that the normal person just has a really difficult time figuring out how to navigate it. That's the hardest part.
Right, right. So under normal circumstances, then the copay, if I go and I'm a patient for the pharmacy services, so you guys. So how does a reimbursement enact it for you guys? I mean, I know you're in constant fundraising mode, because you have to be.
Right, sure. And so does the government do a lot of reimbursement? Or, well, those medications, those high priced, $400 or $500 a month for the medication. So how does the pharmacies stay open and a facility like Wheeling Health rate?
Well, first of all, Medicaid will pay us a small amount to not only fill the prescription, but for the prescription. But most of our patients are above that threshold. So what happens is that we purchase a lot of generic medications. We are what they call a 340B pharmacy, which means that we combine medications at a very good price, federal pricing, which is much, much lower than right aid, or Kroger's could buy it at.
So we're able to get it at that price, and then we can provide it to the patient. And it depends on where the patient is on the income scale. But the most that they might pay is $5 or $10 to us, if they're really high. Then they can go to 250% of the federal poverty level and be a health rate patient if they don't have the insurance or they can't afford it.
OK, let's pause there from the prescription drug aspect, and then let's talk about the services. I know there's a variety of services. I think I just saw a story on one of the TV stations about dental services. And so maybe we'll just start there.
Let's use that as a jumping board. And is this something that just came down the road for dental services, or has this been an effect? It's three years now that it's been there. I've been there since 1992.
It's been a dream for a long time. I have a medical background. I know nothing about dental. And so I've had to really jump through a lot of hoops to get there.
But the Wheeling High Accounting Dental Association has stepped forward. They helped us to plan the clinic. Wendy Tronka, who is our grants writer, wrote the grant for almost $400,000 she brought in through various sources. We didn't take one penny out of operating expenses, and we built the clinic.
And we bought a model, gave up on a big kitchen. But we have two operatories. In the other side, we have state-of-the-art panorax, where you just stand there. And not only do you get your panorax, but then you have to put paper in your mouth and through the bite wings.
It does the bite wings without it. It's very, it's painless, completely painless. We have a great relationship with WVU School of Dentistry that might have been the story that you just saw. We work really closely with Dr.
Borja, who's the dean of WVU Dentistry. And the dental students come up and they'll do restorative work. They'll do fillings and things like that. We have a couple of volunteer dentists in the area that will do root canals.
We have others about 15 dentists total that will volunteer and supervise those dental students because they don't have a license through the week to take care of all the needs of a patient's mouth. Then we have a relationship with WVU, so we bring in oral surgeons once a month. And if somebody's got an abscess or a lot of abscesses, and many of our patients haven't seen a dentist 15, 20 years. So they've got a bad mouth.
They've got a lot of infection, a lot of issues. So we extract the teeth and they're out of pain. They're out of the infections gone. And then their diabetes, their heart disease starts to improve because they no longer have infection in their body.
And now the last piece that we've added in the last year and a half is that we actually make dentures. So we are working with the prosthodonic students down there who are, they're all licensed dentists, but they come up on a Saturday and they take, they make the molds, take the impressions and they make the dentures. And the patients now do have to pay a fee for that. They have to, then they can save up.
They can pay it over a period of time because it takes about four to six months to heal and then be able to get the impressions and get them made. But we've actually made 48 pair of dentures and it has changed people's lives completely. Right, right. You do see the commercials on TV where they're talking about whether you're going to a cosmetic dentist or you're in the need of complete repairs and they say, and whether they're just straight up testimonials or paid endorsements or whatever, but you do see the light in their eyes and the changes of how it changes everything.
The very first person that we put dentures in, she had been, who's been a patient of health rates since I was there and she went, zipping around the clinic, look at me, look at my beautiful smile. I can go do things, I can get a job now. I mean, she was over the top and she did. We've had several recovering individuals who have come through the clinic, may have suffered with meth mouth and has the teeth just brought away with that.
They've gone through recovery, they're doing great, they're stable, they get their dentures. We've got one person who actually trained to be a dental assistant and has a full-time job now, just purchased a car. I mean, we're talking major accomplishments all because they're life changed because they got dentures. Now you referenced West Virginia University.
How about the West Virginia Dental Program? Do any of the students participate in that? We haven't been able to get them to come down. And that's a shame because we really need the hygiene piece.
I have our person that runs the dental hygiene program, I mean, the clinic is a dental hygienist, but she has so many other things to do. She only gets like maybe 168 people clean the year. Well, we've got 26,000 people, a lot of people who need their teeth clean. We would love to have the students come down and do that.
And it's an experience they don't get any other place. They don't get in any other dentist office or at the school. So we would love to do that. But we haven't been able to work out the logistics of that yet.
Right, okay, so the dental program is obviously a brand new or at least three years old integral part of it. So what other, let's just take a step back. So the health right came into being in the middle 80s? In 1985.
Okay, and so what was the genesis? I know reading through some of the history that there was a group of people that basically stepped up and said there was an underserved community, the working poor, I guess, going back for lack of a better term. And so how, yeah, so walk us through a little bit of the history there of how this all gets started. When it started in 1985, Nancy LePart was one of the people who came from Charleston to Wheeling.
They had developed a free clinic, but not a Wheeling, but a West Virginia health right in Charleston. And she saw the same population here, people who couldn't get access to care. So she brought a group of people together first time that Wheeling Hospital and now the funk, OV, actually came together and worked together on a project back in the early days. Imagine that.
They had to do it in a private room in a basement. They wanted to know, they worked together, but they did. And it was wonderful. And it did work.
It was when I started there in 92, it was literally treat them in street. So in other words, you heard of people in at nine o'clock in the morning. You saw everybody, you did the best that you could with whatever medication you had. And then they left at 11, then they opened doors back up at one, and they saw people till three, filled the prescriptions.
As a nurse, I was appalled because it wasn't quality care. Documentation was terrible, but it was meeting a need. Right. Problem would be, for example, if you needed a regular insulin and they only had MPH, you've had MPH.
If you came in and said, I have my toes infected, that might be all you got treated, and yet you had other problems. We moved that along really well. We are now literally a primary care center. We meet all of the needs that we can.
We're kind of like a one-stop shop for the most part now. We not only provide them with care through our nurse practitioners, we have physicians who volunteer and we have other physicians who now, because of Medicaid, we'll see referral patients in their offices for things that really need to be done. We can get them hospital care if they need it. We have a lab on site now, thanks to Wheeling Hospital, WVU relationship.
They actually give us all the lab supplies. We've hired a phlebotomist. She draws the labs. You don't have to be a health rate patient.
So if you want to avoid the disaster right now, because of OB closing, you can actually come to health rate and get your lab work done, and your insurance will pay for it and send Wilson the lab out there to do it. But we can draw it. So it's a quicker step. We have the dental.
We have diabetes education and training. We have pharmacy with an F, which is where we provide for chronic people with chronic diseases, fruits and vegetables for 14 to 16 weeks during the summer, work with Grow High Valley, the WVU Extension office, and teach them how to take care of their chronic diseases without medicine. And we actually do a better job of controlling lipids with fresh fruits and vegetables. Right.
The natural sugars. Yeah, absolutely. And then we have a licensed retail closed pharmacy, which is licensed by the state of West Virginia. It is closed because we only take patients who are our patients.
So you have to either be a meds-only patient or a full health rate patient. But we can film them as in that's because we're 340B. So we can only take care of people who meet our guidelines. And we are now, we just hired actually last Friday, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, because with all of the issues with OB closing, all the access to mental health, we're down just in Northwood.
And that's really difficult. Wheeling's trying to step up to the plate. Reynolds is trying to, but those things take time. So patients can't get their psych meds.
And a family nurse practitioner doesn't understand necessarily the medications that mental illness might require. So we're working with them with her and the patients are just thrilled because they can access the medicine, because they know they don't feel right. And we don't want to see anything bad happen. Now, you mentioned nurse practitioners.
Do you have any PAs on staff also? We did. The last, the only PAs that we've ever had left to take a job with Trinity about six months ago. Okay.
So that was the only one. But a nurse practitioner versus a PA, a nurse practitioner after three years can practice independently. Okay. So she doesn't need to have a physician supervise her, except for the first three years.
A physician assistant has to have that physician agreement her entire, his or her entire career. Oh, okay. Yeah. So really, nurse practitioner is more beneficial to us, although we loved our, and RPA that we had, it's great.
Right. Now, do you have to have, with that said, then do you have to have one or two physicians of record for the entire clinic? Well, Dr. Jim Kymrcy, for the entire, there are 29 years that I've been there has been our volunteer medical director.
Okay. So if we need something we call him, we have a medical policy committee of the Board of Directors, they meet with us every quarter. We bring policies that we want to change and work with them. So they give us really good direction and advice.
So it works out really, really well. Counseling, I was going down through the list here and you referenced it a little bit. So how does family counseling or individual counseling? Well, we have one therapist on staff and he does individual counseling.
We haven't really, we're actually just got a grant from the community foundation and we're going to do peer recovery. So we're going to be working with patients who want to get into recovery. And so that'll be a group session. Okay.
We do group health sessions like group diabetes, education, things like that. Okay. So with the, and jumping off of that a little bit. So with the opioid condition going on around this area, well, the whole tri state area.
So do you see a lot of patients that are looking for help or are looking for a quick fix, I guess, or for lack of a better term or what type of patients do you see in that? Well, number one, the words out on the street that we don't have any narcotics. So they all know that straight up. They're not going to, they may try, but they find out if they're new to town, they find out real quickly that we don't provide them.
Right. But we are seeing a lot of people who do have an addiction and we're trying to help them to get through that. Another piece that I forgot to mention that matches with the opioid crisis is hepatitis C. Okay.
We're seeing a great increase in the hepatitis C in this area. So we have started actually a hepatitis C clinic. We currently have 48 people in treatment and we have five, seven who have completed. If you get treated for hepatitis C and it's a three month process, you're cured.
If you don't get treated, you will die eventually of Hep C. So we want to get the patients in. We want to get them treated. The problem is that it's extremely expensive.
We're talking $12,000 a month. Okay. So to cure somebody, you're talking $36,000. We don't have that money.
Right. But we have the luxury of being involved with drug companies and we know how to work within the Medicaid system that if they do have Medicaid, we've been able to get people on Medicaid approved. So that's working out really, really well. We're talking with Kathy Brown.
She's the executive director of the Wheeling Health Right and hanging in the Hep C conversation for a second. So what is, does anybody know or what's the thought process of why it's become such a problem along with the opioid? Well, beyond the opioid, you know, if you've watched TV at all, constantly they're advertising about Hepatitis C because the baby boomers are the ones that are at the highest risk. So we've taken the direction that everybody who comes in has to, we ask them to have the Hepatitis C screening because we want to know.
They don't, you might not even know you have it, but if you get screened and it becomes apparent and that's because of all of the drug use back in the 70s, 60s and 70s, all the baby boomers, we are all involved in all of that period of time. So they're probably the biggest group of high risk people in addition to now the people that are involved in the whole opioid situation. So there's a vast, it spans the ages really. Right.
Let's jump her off a little subject here and let's talk about you. So you're a registered nurse by trade, correct? I trade, yes. And so how did you get involved with the, is this when Nancy left as the director or a walk us through your background?
There are only three directors of health, right? The first director was Phyllis Sharpenberg and I did not know her, but my understanding is that she was great at getting toilet paper and paper towels and things like that donated and she'd come back with car loads of it. But she really didn't do much of anything else. The second person was Ken George.
They had him for about a year and a half, two years and then me. How I got involved is I went into leadership wheeling. Oh, okay. And I worked at Florence, Trenton, and I've only had three nursing jobs in my career.
I started at visiting nurses, left visiting nurses, went to Creighton and was there for 13 years nursing to the assistant director. And then in leadership wheeling, I had Bill Gossett who now is deceased, but Bill said, you really need to apply for this job. I'm like, I don't know, Bill. I really don't know.
Right. And I took the plunge and went in and did the interview, Chip Rayling and Paul Turner interviewed me probably one of the most intense interviews I've ever had. Really? But it was, it felt right.
Yeah. I took a pay cut. But it was worth it because it was a mission to me. And so for 29 years, it has been my mission.
I believe in the patients that we serve. I want to make sure that they get the best care that they can. Right. And I literally keep it focused, the patient.
If you don't lose sight of the patient, you're not going to do it wrong. Right. So again, we're talking with Kathy Brown, the executive director of the wheeling health rate. So highs and lows.
What drives you to come into work every day? And then what sort of, I guess, for lack of a better term, bummed you out when you walk out the door if something goes wrong? Well, if something goes wrong, you're just crushed that you didn't make a difference. But probably what drives me the most is the difference that we make in people's lives every day.
It's amazing. It really is. And it goes so far as I can be in a restaurant and have somebody from Charleston here and give them my health rate credit card. And they'll say, thank you.
And I'm like, well, you're welcome. No, you don't understand. And I said, OK, you saved my life. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for help.
I get stopped in Kroger's. I get stopped in respects. I was at the Naylor's game Saturday night. And I had a woman come up to me and said, you're the director of health rate, right?
And I said, well, I have a question. It was over the East Ohio, where did my doctor go? What can my daughter do? Can you help us get her medicine?
You know, my name's Plaster. My city of Raleigh. Right. So that's the good part.
The bad part has been some of the ups and downs. I mean, you know, when the Affordable Care came out or Obamacare, it was like the Book of the Week Club. Everything changed every day. And it was overwhelming.
And then we got tossed in literally into having to do Medicaid because we have a line item in the state budget, which gives us uncompensated care funding. But their belief was, and we know that's not right now, was that the Medicaid Obamacare was going to cure all ills and we'd have everybody insured. What didn't work. But they forced us in.
So we had to do that. And learning Medicaid has been a real process. I mean, I thought I was going to lose my mind doing the first application. And Janice Caronbauer, who's my finance manager, you know, she still battles Medicaid every day.
Kelly Clutter Brown that you know got us into Ohio Medicaid last year. That was her first challenge taking my assistant director job. And you know, she's still a year later still fixing the pieces of it because the federal programs are difficult. So that's been a real down when money is short, when we weren't making it because of funding or we weren't sure where we were going to be able to make payroll.
Those are always tough days. But you know, and I have finance people that I say this to and I've said it for years. They're like, you're crazy. But honestly, Dave, when we needed money, it came.
And it only has to be because we are doing the right thing for the right reasons. And the money came. It's the conversation with Kathy Brown, the executive director of the Wheeling Health Right, you've referenced your staff and yourself a couple of times. So how many actual full time people do you have at Wheeling Health Right?
We have 20 full time people and we have nine part time. Okay. And are all the full time people then fully benefited across the board then? Full time people are benefited.
Part time people are not. But they're also working part time. So a lot of them are maybe one day a week, something like that. But I have a great staff.
I mean, honestly, I may get the credit because people see me all the time, but they do all the work. I mean, they're amazing providers. They really take quite quality care. It's better care than you're going to get anywhere else because they take the time and they make sure that they're treating the entire patient.
They bring the family in if they need to. They do whatever they need. But they're great. That our staff, I put them up against anybody.
They're really, really good. So I'm staying in the realm of finance. So let's talk about how we get money. So and the fundraising that you do across the gamut of everything that goes on.
So I know you've got a fundraiser, your largest fundraiser, correct? That's coming up. So it's going to be at West Bank Arena. So it's the wing.
What's the official title? The official title is Chef's Auction. Chef's Auction. May the first this year.
Kelly Clutter Brown that I mentioned before, she's in charge of it. She's doing a great job. It's going to be once upon a time. It's our theme.
But the goal is to number one, raise awareness and number two, to get people to donate to the cause. And it's packed every year. Right. Even when we've increased prices thinking, well, we'll make a little more on the ticket, but we'll cut down.
We have it. I mean, people love the event. It's casual. It's fun.
The food's amazing. Whatever is always a good, fun evening. And we love it. Last year, we made $80,000.
Wow, really? Yeah. And that's why we focused on one. I watched so many nonprofits who do a different fundraiser every week or a different fundraiser every month.
You can't keep going back to the well. We were very lucky and actually was the March of Dimes came to me years ago, actually 1993. No, 92. And said, we had this great fundraiser, but we're closing the state office.
We want Wheeling to have this. And so they were doing the Chef's Auction. And it's, you know, the first year I was a nervous wreck. I didn't think we had two vendors.
We had no salad and the dessert person canceled at the last minute. We were insane. Did this start out at the White Palace? No, it actually started out at the old library.
You remember when the restaurant was down there, the caterer after Wheeling, we're doing one, shall we? Yeah. Okay. That was after it closes the library.
I forget their name. Open that up. Friends of Dr. Comerse.
We had the first one there. And I was like, at five minutes till six, I was like, do you think anybody's going to come? Right. You know, but we made $8,000 and we thought we really did something great.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, the budget when I started there was $140,000.
Okay. That was expected. That was still a lot of money to make. Right.
You know, and it's just grown. Then we went to the White Palace and Angie was amazing out there. We had great events and then we grew it. Okay.
That's what I thought. Yeah. West Banka was the only place that we had left that we could go. Right.
And you know, Denny and them have been great with us. They work with us. They are very helpful and it's really, it's a great event. Yeah.
So much fun. Yeah. Again, it's Kathy Brown, the executive director of the Wheeling Health Rate. So you said that is your concentration.
So do you do any other ancillary? Well, we do some some ancillary. Okay. Okay.
And we will get items donated that we use for the chef's auction. We've done candle parties. Congregations for caring, though, is our other biggest fundraiser that actually stemmed from Lynn, or Lynn Exley out of a approach. She read the newspaper and saw that a high county commission was not supporting health rate.
Okay. And you know, the other commissioners and the other counties do. Right. And so she was concerned about that.
So she decided that she needed to come to me and see what we could work out. So she brought this advisory group together in three years. They've raised $76,000 with only three points. One, to get all the faith communities to pray for us.
And we're going to get the awareness to let more people know that we're there. And on the side note, maybe raise some money. Little did she know that it was going to raise the volume of money that it has. Right.
So she's shooting for somewhere down the road to go over that hundred thousand. Yeah. But we've got amazing people actually talking about that on Monday evening at seven o'clock at Temple Shalom. Rabbi Leif is hosting an interfaith prayer group, prayer program for us, for people to come of all faiths, pray for about health rate, for health rate.
A lot of the priests and the rabbi and actually the bishop is scheduled to come. And they're going to all give a little prayer and comments about the clinic and then they'll give a background about the clinic. Last year was a beautiful service. And we're very excited that we'll get more churches involved this year in that service.
But we have about 78 churches that we contact and we just picked up Marshall County. It's going pretty strong now too. So we're very pleased. It's a great program and just the awareness is just knowing that they're all praying for us.
That's huge. Just knowing that we're getting those prayers. Well, we are up against the clock here. This has been the weekend focus.
Kathy, what if you had some final thoughts that you want to get out there, the word about healing health rate and the services that are offered? What could be a good summation statement? Well, we just like to say that we are always there. We do everything that we can for uninsured and underinsured and we're doing everything we can to be a part of the solution for the OV East to high closing.
So if anybody has any questions, if anybody feels a need, certainly call us and find out if you're eligible for services. 304-23-9323. We're there to help. Great.
Okay, great. This has been the weekend focus. We've been talking with Kathy Brown, the executive director of the Wheeling Health Rate. And you do it again next week.
And if you want to pick up the podcast, you can do so on any of the iHeart Radio Stations.