Dr. Zane Gates (left) and Altoona Housing Authority Deputy Executive Director Brad Kanuch pose in the new clinic for tower residents opened through a partnership between Gloria Gates CARE and the housing authority. Mirror photo by William Kibler

Two years after it was first discussed, a clinic providing enhanced primary care for Medicaid recipients will begin accepting patients today at the Altoona Housing Authority’s Green Avenue Tower, one of the authority’s two downtown towers for seniors and the disabled.

Based on a partnership between Gloria Gates CARE and the Housing Authority, the project aims to ease the friction that tends to prevent low-income older people from getting the health care they need, according to Gloria Gates CARE co-founder Zane Gates, who spoke to the Mirror Wednesday.

That friction includes transportation hassles for people who don’t own cars and have difficulties getting accepted into primary care practices, because low Medicaid reimbursements for doctors make it unaffordable for those practices to take too many such patients, Gates said.

Easing that friction for eligible enrollees — Medicaid recipients living at either Green Avenue or 11th Street towers — is a function not only of the new outreach setting, as residents can simply walk to the clinic, but also of Gloria Gates CARE’s operating principles, which include helping patients deal with impediments to healthy living, like food insecurity and management of medications.

“People in these situations need a lot more care,” Gates said, while seated in the office at the new clinic, a remodeled space on the first floor that was originally an apartment, then later the offices of a nonprofit agency. “More than a 15-minute office visit.”

The efforts of staffers at Gloria Gates CARE can take the form of checkup calls to ensure patients understand instructions given when they last visited, Gates said.

That “more” also includes ongoing care for the chronic illnesses that afflict many and attention to the “social determinants of health” with which many struggle, Gates said. “(That) other stuff is just as important,” he said.

Social determinants of health include educational background, financial savvy and job history.

One of the big ones is housing, Gates said.

That one is covered in the case of his new outreach patients, he said.

Another is financial resources.

The average lifespan for poor people in western Pennsylvania is 67 for Blacks and 70 for whites, Gates said.

The average lifespan for middle-class people is 78, he said.

For wealthy people, it’s 83, he said.

The new partnership with Gloria Gates CARE is an opportunity to provide more resources for tower residents than just housing, said authority Executive Director Cheryl Johns.

“I’ve never been just a brick-and-mortar kind of director,” Johns said.

The tower clinic will become the first outreach for Gloria Gates CARE, which is itself a new membership-based, direct primary care operation founded by Gates and other investors to serve Medicaid patients.

It’s named after Gates’ mother, who raised Gates in the Evergreen Manors housing project in Eldorado.

The organization’s main location is at Puritan Park, on the 2500 block of Ninth Avenue, near the Grande Palazzo.

In addition to ordinary primary care, Gloria Gates CARE offers an in-house pharmacist, in-house social worker and in-house dietitian; screening for drug and alcohol and mental health issues; lab services, including blood tests; a formulary of basic drugs; virtual visits with specialists; X-ray, MRI and CAT-scan services; and heart and lung function testing, according to Val Mignogna, senior vice president for clinical operations, speaking previously to the Mirror.

The Green Avenue Tower outreach will operate from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thursdays, with a nurse practitioner and a medical assistant.

Tower residents were able to sign up late last week.

The authority is providing the clinic space for free, according to Gates.

Health insurance plans through UPMC and Geisinger that contract with the state to administer Medicaid money will pay Gloria Gates CARE fixed amounts per patient per month, in a “capitation” system, Gates said.

He declined to reveal the amount of the payments.

The capitation system allows for elimination of many billing and administrative costs, helping keep expenses down, officials said previously.

It’s in the interest of those companies’ health care provider arms that those patients be kept healthy, as the health care system’s current capacity is strained, Gates said.

The Green Avenue Tower outreach could be a model of “whole person care” for other low-income housing developments, according to Gates.

There could be marketing efforts within the towers’ population to inform residents of the clinic opportunity, although the most effective means of securing patients will be by word of mouth, predicted authority Deputy Executive Director Brad Kanuch.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.