Clinica Family Health CEO speaks to Boulder Rotary Club

BOULDER – Steal shamelessly, share senselessly. That’s a personal philosophy that Pete Leibig, CEO of Clinica Family Health Services, told the Boulder Rotary Club has helped make his organization a national leader in health care.Clinica is a nonprofit organization serving poor and underserved families through its four sites – two in Adams County, one in Lafayette and the People’s Clinic in Boulder, which merged with the Clinica system last year.Without such a resource for poor people, Leibig said, the uninsured tend to use hospital emergency rooms for their health care, a much more expensive alternative. Therefore, Clinica saves the community money by efficiently treating low-income patients and implementing preventive programs that limit catastrophic expenses.Clinica Family Health Services has an annual budget of $24 million and a staff of 300, including 62 caregivers. In conjunction with local hospitals, the facilities deliver 2,000 babies a year and also provide 4,100 immunizations, 1,500 mental health diagnoses and 4,200 well-child visits. And that doesn’t include the urgent care and preventive care visits.Leibig focused most of his talk on People’s Clinic and its progress renovating the old Kaiser Building at 13th and Portland streets in Boulder The clinic is implementing innovative work pods that co-locate an entire work team with line-of-sight access to each other and exam rooms, allowing staff to maximize efficiency and quality. Leibig said the clinic moved to making same-day appointments for patients and not double-booking them, and decreased the patient no-show rate from 32 percent to 8 percent. Efficiency experts didn’t believe the system would work.Annual statistics for the People’s Clinic give a sobering reminder of the level of health-care need in the community we think of as well-to-do. The clinic treats 12,000 patients with 40,000 visits a year. Of those, 35 percent are under 17 years old and only 5 percent are over 65. Eighty percent of the patients come from households with an employed worker and 97 percent live at less than twice the poverty level. The Federal government sets the poverty level at approximately $26,000 for a family of four.Leibig praised Clinica’s collaborative relationship with other area non-profits and acknowledged the City of Boulder’s financial support of $350,000 a year, noting that the other municipalities provide very little. He also thanked two Boulder Rotary Club members, surgeons Nelson Trujillo and Charlie Jones, who discount their services to People’s Clinic patients, and Club President Peter Ewing, a retired physician, for his previous help.- reported by Francie Anhut