Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland
8757 Georgia Avenue, 10th Floor
Silver Spring, MD 20910

Overview: The Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County (PCC) was founded in 1993 as a private, non-profit, charitable organization, whose vision is that all county residents have the opportunity to live healthy lives, and that Montgomery County will be the healthiest community in the nation, serving as a model for providing access to high-quality and efficient care for all.  Since then, the PCC has grown from a handful of dedicated volunteers to the robust organization of today, with a staff of 70, a 18-member all volunteer board of directors, and a growing number of collaborators and community and academic partners.
 
Historically, the PCC has served as an advocate for county residents without insurance or the resources to pay for health care, and has proven to be an efficient administrator of gap-filling programs for Montgomery County.  These long-standing programs include Project Access (beginning in 1995), Healthcare for the Homeless (1996), and Care for Kids (1998).  Since 2005, the PCC has administered Montgomery Cares, a public/private partnership that is tasked with providing primary and preventive health care to 40,000 low-income, uninsured county adult residents by the year 2010.  Montgomery Cares patients receive health services at one of the eight independent nonprofit clinic organizations known collectively as Community HealthLink.
 
To these eight primary care Community HealthLink clinic organizations, PCC brings infrastructure in the form of an open-source, Web-based electronic health record now shared among clinics at nearly 50 sites; a medicine-access program that provides clinic patients with low-cost generic medicines and free medicine from the pharmaceutical industry's patient assistance program; management of a private-practice physician network that provides specialty care to the clinics, and coordination of a multi-clinic patient diabetes disease management initiative.
 
In addition, PCC evaluates and obtains significant supplemental funding for  these programs, funding that allows for additional programming and enhancements to existing services.  Current active PCC grants total $2.6 milliion (June 2009), and include the first-ever Komen for the Cure Foundation Community/Academic Partnership grant.  Co-recipients with the Primary Care Coalition in this grant are the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
 
PCC serves as a systems integrator among numerous partners who share a mandate to care for Montgomery County's working poor; partners include the Community HealthLink clinics, the five Montgomery County hospitals, the County Department of Health and Human Services, and other nonprofits.  Within the PCC, the staff is organized into five Centers:  the Center for Health Care Access, the Center for Medicine Access, the Center for Community-Based Health Informatics, the Center for Health Improvement, and the Center for Children's Health, each of which is headed by a senior-level director.
 
The Primary Care Coalition is a member of Communities Joined in Action, Clinicians for the Underserved, the Campus-Community Partnership, and the Regional Primary Care Coalition.  The PCC collaborates programmatically with the Georgetown University Center for Trauma and the Community, the University of Maryland, and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.  The PCC currently serves as a training site for the Georgetown University School of Public Health and the Princeton 54 Fellowship program.  Affiliations with the Johns Hopkins and Georgetown University Medical Schools and Towson University are under development.