Delivery of Care

Transforming health and wellness in Central Falls

A new Neighborhood Health Station facility being built on Broad Street promises to transform the health and economy of residents living in the square-mile city, perhaps even more so than a new commuter train station

Courtesy of Edward T. Rowse, Architects

A three-dimensional architectural drawing of the new 47,000-square-foot Neighborhood Health Station community hub for health services being built by Blackstone Valley Community Health Care in Central Falls, at the site for the former Notre Dame urgent care facility.

Courtesy of Edward T. Rowse, Architects

A three-dimensional architectural drawing by Edward T. Rowse, Architects, of the new Neighborhood Health Station being built in Central Falls by Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, to serve as a hub for health services for residents in Central Falls.

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By Richard Asinof
Posted 8/1/16
The latest architectural drawings for the new Neighborhood Health Station being built in Central Falls by Blackstone Valley Community Health Care illustrate the promising changes underway through investments in health, not just health care, focused on community needs.
How will the emergence of two Neighborhood Health Stations, one in Scituate and the other in Central Falls, fit into the State Innovation Model plans moving forward? How will the efforts underway with the 11 Health Equity Zones in Rhode Island become more integrated as a larger health equity initiative? How will the presidential election change the flow of policy and money at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? What is the status of the All Payers Claims Database? Which community in Rhode Island will be next to launch its own Neighborhood Health Station?
Underneath the concept of Neighborhood Health Stations is a larger issue: what does it mean to live in a neighborhood? How do we define the boundaries of neighborhoods in a world where much of the conversations occur online? How does a neighborhood become engaged in policy conversations and debates?
In recent weeks, we have seen the power of what an engaged community can accomplish in challenging corporate policy assumptions: Save The Bay challenged ProvPort about its plan to fill in some 31 acres of Narragansett Bay, and won. As an important sidebar, a receiver was appointed to oversee the cleanup of polluted recycled metal operation targeted for purchase under the ProvPort expansion plan.
Similarly, the need to build the planned natural gas power plant in Burrillville has been challenged by a coalition of engaged citizens’ groups.
What the successful launch of two Neighborhood Health Stations has done is to put words into action in developing a positive solution to what health care can be, defined by an engaged community.

CENTRAL FALLS – The latest architectural drawings completed by Edward T. Rowse, Architects, provide a compelling glimpse of the future for the new Neighborhood Health Station that is being built by Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, at the location of the former Notre Dame urgent care facility on Broad Street that had been run by Memorial Hospital.

The design of the new Neighborhood Health Station is much more than a story about the construction of a new 47,000 square-foot facility, financed in large part by a $1 million award from the “Health Infrastructure Investment Program” that was announced on May 4 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The new Neighborhood Health Station will serve as a one-stop community center providing primary care, express walk-in-care, occupational therapy, physical therapy, dental care, and behavioral health care, serving as a hub to meet the community health needs in Central Falls – and, by doing so, keep much of the money being spent on health services by residents in the local economy. [See links below to ConvergenceRI stories.]

Central Falls Mayor James Diossa predicted earlier this year that the new Neighborhood Health Station would serve as a beneficial tool of economic development. “The presence of an all-encompassing neighborhood station will improve access to health care and instill the focus on preventative care amongst residents,” he told ConvergenceRI, allowing Central Falls residents to go to one local facility for most health services, instead of relying on emergency department visits.

“Cutting down on emergency room visits and avoiding expensive future care, provides a direct savings to residents, employers, and insurers,” Diossa said. “Lower health care costs also have the benefit of attracting businesses to a community with productive and healthy residents.”

Context matters
The story of the new Central Falls facility takes place within a much larger context: the ongoing attempts to redesign the health care delivery system in Rhode Island.

Neighborhood Health Stations put the emphasis on meeting community needs, as defined by community members, through the concept of building community-based facilities with a wide array of services in one location.

As Ray Lavoie, the executive director of Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, the community health center serving Pawtucket and Central Falls, told ConvergenceRI, the concept requires a new way of thinking about health care delivery.


“The approach being taken by the Neighborhood Health Station in Central Falls, our attempt to deliver 90 percent of the health services needed by 90 percent of the population of a geographic region, cannot be simply a rearrangement of medical office locations, nor can it be achieved simply with various co-location schemes,” Lavoie said.

To achieve the health outcomes sought, Lavoie continued, the new approach required breaking down existing silos and, at the same time, building up a health IT platform that connects providers and patients as well as providers to providers, without intermediaries.

“To be successful at improving population health in the community, and to accomplish this at a lower cost to the health care system, clinical information must be readily available to all treating clinicians in the community,” Lavoie said.

To do so, Blackstone Valley is building out its health IT infrastructure to support a community health platform for clinicians, owned and operated by clinicians, for the benefit of all members of the community, financed by a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation.

Community dialogue
Equally important to the success of the Neighborhood Health Station is the inclusive nature of the ongoing conversation, dialogue and collaboration between community stakeholders.

Stakeholder conversations continue on a regular basis in Central Falls on how best to design and to knit together health care services based upon the needs of the community, rather than just the needs of the payers or the providers.

Participants in the ongoing conversations include: the City of Central Falls, Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, the YMCA of Pawtucket, Progreso Latino, Central Falls Housing, Anchor Recovery, several home visiting agencies, visiting nurses, and the R.I. Council of Churches, among others.



The inclusion of the city’s emergency responders in those conversations have helped to focus discussions about the potential of reorganizing those services and connecting them to primary care for the first time, according to Dr. Michael Fine, the former director of the R.I. Department of Health, who is currently working part-time with Blackstone Valley Community Health Care.

“Emergency medical services, or EMS, are not functionally connected to the health care system,” Fine explained. “They operate as a vacuum, sucking people up from the community and dumping them at hospitals.”


Urban and rural
A second Neighborhood Health Station is now under construction in Scituate, renovating a 5,000 square-foot storefront at the Scituate Village Marketplace shopping plaza off Route 6.

The new facility, which is designed to serve the needs of some 10,000 local residents in the surrounding rural communities that before had very limited access to local health services, is scheduled to open this fall. [See link below to ConvergenceRI story.]

The team of providers will include primary care clinicians, social workers, nurses, dentists and dental hygienists, physical and occupational therapists, paramedics and emergency medical technicians.

The new Neighborhood Health Station in Scituate is a partnership between WellOne, a community health center in Pascoag originally founded in 1909, serving the rural communities of Burrillville, Foster and Gloucester and North Kingstown, and the Scituate Health Alliance, a local nonprofit that has been exploring ways of providing local, accessible and affordable health care to Scituate since 2000.



The design of the services being offered was based in large part upon a comprehensive health care needs survey of Scituate residents – detailing what the residents said they wanted, according to Peter Bancroft, president and CEO of WellOne.

“In this country, we have a system where we get paid to treat illnesses, instead of keeping people healthy,” Bancroft said. “We get paid by the number of procedures we perform.”

The new Neighborhood Health Station, Bancroft continued, “is a shift in philosophy, with a focus on the population of the community, and what we can do to keep the population healthy.”

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