Rather than basing fees on a sliding scale — a system which many organizations use — the clinic is free, full stop. This means they serve the most underserved populations of Springfield.
"We've always had to be creative with how we utilize our resources and how we approach our patient population," Practice Manager Justin Gassel told KSMU at an event last Wednesday celebrating a decade of the clinic. "We offer a lot of grace, we offer a lot of forgiveness for our patients — more than you may see in other clinics, but that's because we recognize [that] if they're not coming to our clinic, they're either utilizing the emergency room or they're maybe not being seen at all."
An example: "we know a lot of [our patients] have either no car — or anxiety using public transportation," Gassel explained. "So we used grant money from when COVID was here to help fund some transportation resources in the form of gas cards, bus passes and covered cab vouchers."
Beyond being entirely free, the Care Clinic is distinct for how many specialists it houses under one roof.
"I like to use diabetes as an example," said Gassel. "[Say] a patient gets told that they're now diabetic for the first time, they can sit down with a nutritionist and a pharmacist to talk about how the insulin we're going to be prescribing works within the body and how is that going to impact diet?"
That pharmacist comes through UMKC, which partners with MSU for a Doctor of Pharmacy program. The Care Clinic also receives monthly donations of both non-perishables and produce through Ozarks Food Harvest, paid for by Women with a Mission, a Mercy Foundation subgroup. There are a lot of partnerships involved to make this thing work.
Recently, after Medicaid expansion reduced patient numbers for the Care Clinic by something like 2/3, they expanded their requirements to also cover individuals on Medicaid who still fall below income threshold.
As Gassell told KSMU, spreading that information is the biggest thing on the horizon for the project.