Community Benefit

The primary mission of PRO is met through providing a medical home and access to comprehensive healthcare services for those in our community who are medically uninsured and do not have the financial resources to obtain services on their own. The overall health of the community is improved, and the individual stories of people whose lives have been changed for the better are many. In addition, although perhaps less touching but nonetheless important, there are very real and practical benefits for our local healthcare community in the form of significant cost savings. 

It is well documented that individuals who lack access to basic healthcare services, including routine preventive care, often end up using hospital emergency departments (ED) for their source of health care. Uncompensated ED visits, and subsequent hospitalizations in some cases, drive up health care costs for the entire community. PRO has shown an ability to largely prevent inappropriate ED utilization among its clients, thereby reducing the costs represented by uncompensated (charity) care. We do this by (1) keeping clients healthier by providing access to care and (2) aggressively educating clients on the proper use of the hospital ED, i.e. for true emergencies only. Whether a patient visits the ED for a non-emergent problem, or whether the visit is a true emergency resulting from a poorly controlled chronic illness, the cost is very high. The cost is higher by an order of several magnitudes if the problem results in the patient having to be admitted to the hospital. 

Approximate average cost of an ED visit:                         $320
Approximate average cost of one day in the hospital:        $2,000 

PRO’s estimate of the dollars saved for our local health care system through keeping patients out of the EDs and hospital rooms is in the millions.