The Nassau Health Care Corporation

Of Nassau County’s thousands of medically underserved residents, 60,000 live in poverty. The Nassau Health Care Corporation (NHHC) is the region’s primary safety net provider and provider of care to patients who are covered by Medicaid or uninsured.

Among other health care resources, it operates the Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC), a 631-bed tertiary care teaching hospital and six community health diagnostic and treatment centers.

The program provides applicants with coordinated care, including a personal physician, a transportable (electronic) medical record, and a membership card to ensure that health care is supervised in an appropriate manner while placing the responsibility of paying for the service on NHCC. Among its activities, the project developed a network of government, faith- and community-based organizations that assist in gaining access to the target populations; conducted an outreach campaign to inform them of the NuCare program; negotiated an agreement among a network of providers that supplemented the primary care provided by NHCC; created a Web site to provide information and support for patients; and implemented patient management software that will permit inter- and intra-agency oversight of patient care. Implementation of NuCare was expected to double NUMC’s outpatient visits to 565,000 per year within three years.