PROVIDENCE – On late Friday afternoon, workers were busy putting the final touches on hanging a new sign on the wall in the main waiting room of Open Door Health, a circular sign where the bright metallic circles of colors – blue, red, orange, purple, yellow and green – flow into each other, the brightness of the sign matching the openness of the interior of the new health clinic and the promise inherent in the new enterprise.

Meanwhile, outside, members of the staff were busy collecting windblown trash from the nearby Dunkin Donuts dumpster, getting the front of the building spruced up for the grand opening on Monday, March 2.

The new storefront health clinic, Open Door Health, tucked behind the busy street scene on Broad Street, is Rhode Island’s first health clinic dedicated to serving the LGBTQ community, developed by the R.I. Public Health Institute. The messaging behind the clinic  articulates the vision: “We help you to be you.”

The new health clinic will officially open its doors on Monday, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that will include Gov. Gina Raimondo, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rep. David Cicilline, and Neil Steinberg, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation.

Dr. Phil Chan, the medical director at Open Door Health, and Dr. Amy Nunn, Sc.D,, the executive director of the clinic, will also be featured speakers, along with a number of community advocates.

First of its kind in Rhode Island
The openness of the décor is matched by the openness of the clinic’s approach to providing primary health care services and express testing and screening for HIV, sexually transmitted infections and Hepatitis C.

Chan, the medical director, explained that one of the biggest gaps in Rhode Island in general is access to primary care. “That’s amplified if you are a member of the LGBTQ community, because there is just such limited access to care – certainly care that is done in a culturally competent, accepting, welcoming manner.”

That is the mission we hope to fulfill,” Chan continued. “We hope to provide state-of-the-art, culturally competent care that includes sexual health services and gender care, to meet the needs of the LGBTQ community.”

Care in our own backyard
Joe Lazzerini, co-chair of the Open Door Health Community Advisory Board, echoed Chan in describing the importance of providing access to culturally competent care.

“I know so many people who have had to travel to Boston to go to Fenway Health or travel across the state to go to Thundermist,” Lazzerini said. “When people access doctors and access health care providers, they want to do it in their backyard, they want to be able to take a bus, they want to be able to walk, they want to be able to take a bike; they don’t’ want to have to travel across state lines or travel across city borders to go to another community in order to access good quality health care, [where the providers] understand who we are.”

When I say, ‘who we are,’ Lazzerini explained, “I mean who we are as LGBTQ people. Not every doctor understands what it is like to be a queer person who is trying to access good quality health care.”

Good karma
The building where Open Door Health is located, at 7 Central St., had once served as the headquarters of the Marriage Equality organizing effort in 2013, bringing with it a sense of good karma, according to Nunn.

The choice of the location was intentional, she explained. “We wanted to be in this part of Providence and this part of the community, because there is a lot of need for services here. This is also where the state’s highest STD burden is, right here.”

We wanted to have the kind of a storefront look and feel, Nunn continued, one that feels like it was part of the fabric of the community. “We wanted to have a contemporary design that we thought would appeal broadly to everyone but to young people in particular.”

Our clinic, she said proudly, “It looks hip and funky and that look is intentional.” The wallpaper in the bathrooms, for instance, includes stylized motifs of bananas and cherries.

“We also wanted to have a space that felt affirming, sex positive, and also a place that didn’t feel like a sterile clinic environment,” she said.

The effort in shaping the interior space of the clinic is an ongoing work in progress, Nunn explained. “We would love to feature local artists on our gallery wall,” she said. “So, if people want to work with us on identifying art of the space, my vision is for us to have a rotating gallery.” In addition, a street mural for the clinic is being planned.

Measuring success in patient satisfaction
Nunn stressed that research will play an important part of the continued operations at Open Door Health.

“We are also scientists,” Nunn said. “We track every single thing that we do. We have developed our kiosk system where we have all but eliminated paper. We have dramatically reduced and minimized the amount of paper.”

The goal, Nunn continued, will be to do everything electronically, as much as legally possible. “People will log in at a kiosk,” she said, on a computer. “Everyone will do a brief patient intake and a brief sexual history and a brief primary care survey.” As a result, the clinic will have metrics on the number of people who come through the clinic.

But more than volume, Nunn said, “I think the other metric that is really important to us is patient satisfaction. Yes, I think volume is a really good indicator of patient satisfaction, but we also want to make sure that our clients are happy.”

The clinic has created some ways that people can give us more feedback online and with surveys, but ultimately, Nunn said, “I would like to do a kiosk-in and a kiosk-out [analysis], so that people can offer their feedback in real time.”

Being prepared
One of the innovations that Open Door Health offers is the ability to screen for sexually transmitted diseases without having to be seen by a provider, in an express manner.

At the same time, Chan said that there was need to be flexible. “It’s a balance,” he explained. “Because there are a lot of people who may come in thinking that they want that [an express screening], and then they actually want to talk about it. The bottom line is that we have to prepare for both scenarios.”

The important factor in delivering care, Chan continued, is to be able to do it a customer-centered, or patient-centered approach. “That is what we’re trying to do.”

In addition, Open Door Health will function in a collaborative fashion to address public health needs, with referrals across health systems, including Lifespan and Care New England, as well as working closely with the Providence Community Health Centers and its chief medical officer, Dr. Andrew Saal.

An excitement
Lazzerini talked about the excitement that people in the LGBTQ community feel about the opening of the clinic. “I know I said this before, but members of our community need access to good quality health care, and health providers that understand who they are and where they are at,” he said.

“The fact that Open Door Health is opening, and it is opening in their backyard and their community, is a beautiful, really wonderful thing,” he said.