Quality of Care in Free and Charitable Clinics: Creating a Roadmap to Health Equity - Project Summary/Abstract
Little is known about the quality of care in free and charitable clinics (“FCCs”), which are private, nonprofit
organizations that rely on volunteer, licensed clinicians and private donations to provide a range of healthcare
services to uninsured and underserved patients at no cost or for a small fee. The nation's 1,400 FCCs serve
more than two million patients and provide five million visits each yeari. They are estimated to reach one in
every eight uninsured patients who seek care.
This application proposes a two-day, invitation-only, in-person conference, “Quality of Care in Free and
Charitable Clinics: Creating a Roadmap to Health Equity,” as a mechanism to reach consensus from a diverse
array of stakeholders on a set of quality measures as well as the methods by which to collect such quality data
from all FCCs in a centralized, national dataset. The conference will be held in conjunction with the Annual
National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics (“NAFC”) Symposium and will take place during the final
day and the day after their meeting in the fall of 2018. The conference is endorsed by the leading national and
state organizations representing FCCs.
This national forum is the first of its kind for FCCs. The overall aims of the conference are to: discuss what is
currently known about the quality of care in free and charitable clinics, identify barriers to generating
knowledge on a national scale and determine ways to generate sector wide support; connect key stakeholders
to reach consensus on a) a set of quality measures; and b) the practical ways to collect such measures,
including those needed to address health equity, from FCCs across the United States; and cultivate new
working groups to (a) implement the consensus document and b) establish the framework for integrating health
equity into quality improvement.
