Petaluma Health Center opens Rohnert Park branch

Petaluma Health Center is just days away from launching a new comprehensive primary care facility in Rohnert Park, a city that is home to a significant portion of its rapidly growing patient base.

Offering specialty services like dental, mental health and substance abuse counseling in addition to primary care, the site will reflect and in some ways expand the model of Petaluma Health Center’s successful main location on North McDowell Boulevard, which opened in 2011.

As they prepare to open what will be the only facility of its kind in Rohnert Park on Monday, leaders in the effort said the new location will fill a crucial gap in the medical services available to residents of southern Sonoma County while freeing up the Petaluma-based facility’s capacity to serve patients in the city and throughout the region.

“Rohnert Park has always been our responsibility to take care of. The fact is, a third of our patients live in Rohnert Park,” said Kathryn Powell, the health center’s CEO.

At more than 35,000 square feet, the Rohnert Park Health Center includes more than a dozen rooms for dental care, two primary care-focused rooms, a number of rooms for mental health services, a large group room, a pharmacy and optometry services. Launching the facility cost a total of $9 million, paid by a combination of health center revenue, private grants and a $900,000 allocation from the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.

It is the fifth location for Petaluma Health Center and the first outside of the city. The health center also operates clinics at Casa Grande High School, San Antonio High School and the Mary Isaak Center, and serves a total of 25,000 patients.

Like the Petaluma location, the Rohnert Park Health Center will focus on serving populations that have historically lacked an ongoing relationship with a primary care doctor - a key starting point for preventative and specialty medicine. Such individuals are typically low-income, and face challenges including inadequate insurance coverage.

Originally launched as a department of the Petaluma Health Care District, which owns Petaluma Valley Hospital, the health center was created in part to address the pressure such patients were putting on the hospital’s emergency room.

“In Petaluma there were thousands of people without access to care, other than on an episode-to-episode basis in emergency rooms,” said Daymon Doss, who retired from his role as district CEO in 2011.

The program spun off as an independent “federally qualified health center” in 2001, a designation that allowed it to receive special federal and state funding in exchange for providing primary care to those underserved populations. It has since evolved into an organization that Doss described as one of the best in the United States, offering a wide range of services beyond the scope of many health centers around the country.

“Once we actually opened a health center in Petaluma, we saw it wasn’t just an issue for medical care, but for mental and dental care, too,” said Doss, who is now an independent consultant having joined the health center as acting chief operating officer in June. “It has grown and evolved into a complete health care system.”

Powell said the center serves 3,000 to 4,000 patients each year who are not considered low-income.

“They have good jobs, but they are looking for the best-quality care,” she said.

While Rohnert Park does have the uninsured-focused Jewish Community Free Clinic and an urgent care center operated by St. Joseph Health, the scale of the need for primary care has meant thousands of patients traveling to either Petaluma or a similar center in Santa Rosa for care, she said.

“We’ve always tried to serve Rohnert Park as best as we could from Petaluma,” said Powell.

The Rohnert Park facility is expected to reach 100,000 visits per year and an expected 20,000 patients in its first three years of operation, said Pedro Toledo, chief administrative officer for Petaluma Health Center.

“It will be almost the size of Petaluma Health Center,” which has around 127,000 patient visits per year, Toledo said.

In accepting a wide range of insurance plans, physicians at such centers are considered to play an important role in fulfilling the vision of the Affordable Care Act. While millions of individuals have been able to obtain coverage under the law, the number of providers accepting new patients under Medi-Cal, California’s version of the federal low-income health insurance program Medicaid, is often extremely limited, Doss noted. Rohnert Park is the only Sonoma County city without a federally qualified health center.

“In Rohnert Park, there has been a limited number of primary care physicians,” he said. “It’s all about access to care.”