Seven – half – of Iowa’s 14 community health centers were recognized with the Gold Health Center Quality Leader badge, meaning they perform in the top 10% of all community health centers nationwide. To put it another way, 50% of Iowa’s community health centers perform among the top 10% of the 1,400 health centers across the nation! This is a remarkable accomplishment.
One Iowa community health center also achieved the Silver Health Center Quality Leader badge, performing in the top 11-20% nationally. And one of the health centers receiving a Gold Health Center Quality Leader badge also received the National Quality Leader for their work to improve heart health, performing in the top 4% of all health centers nationwide in heart health.
Rhode Island was the only other state to achieve 50% of health centers receiving gold status. Only one other state, California, had more Gold Health Center Quality Leader health centers, and two states, Texas and New York, tied with Iowa. Each of these three states are much larger and have many more health centers, making Iowa’s accomplishments that much more remarkable. At least two Iowa health centers received badges in each of the categorical awards, as well.
“We are proud of our member community health centers for the incredible achievements in providing quality care to nearly 250,000 Iowans each year,” said Aaron Todd, Chief Executive Officer of the Iowa Primary Care Association. “We all know that Iowans are humble by nature and so I greatly appreciate this recognition of the passionate and hardworking community health centers who – often without fanfare or significant recognition – are doing the necessary work each and every day to ensure access to high quality, affordable healthcare services in under-resourced urban and rural communities all across our state. And, in fact, Iowa’s community health centers are leading the nation in the quality of services provided.”
“Congratulations to my colleagues across the state and thank you to our many community and state partners who believe in and collaborate with us in support of our mission. As these Health Center Quality Badges demonstrate, investments in the community health center model produce meaningful improvements in the health of Iowans,” said Daniel Zinnel, Board Chair of the Iowa Primary Care Association and CEO of Proteus, Inc.
“Iowa’s community health centers are committed to helping patients reach their optimal health potential. We have worked for years as individual health centers and collaboratively across the state to ensure our services are of high quality, and that focus on quality and continuous improvement is part of our culture. We appreciate HRSA for recognizing Iowa community health centers’ accomplishments,” said Joe Lock, Chair of IowaHealth+, a clinically integrated network of Iowa community health centers and the Iowa Primary Care Association and CEO of Eastern Iowa Health Center.
More from HRSA on the Community Health Quality Recognition Badges: https://data.hrsa.gov/topics/health-centers/chqr
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Iowa’s community health centers received the following recognition:
- Health Center Quality Leader (8 awardees): awarded to those achieving the best overall clinical quality measure (CQM) performance among all health centers. Health centers in the top 30% are recognized in the following tiers: Gold (top 10%), Silver (top 11-20%), and Bronze (top 21-30%).
- Gold:
- Community Health Care
- Community Health Centers of Southeastern Iowa
- Crescent Community Health Center
- Peoples Community Health Clinic
- Promise Community Health Center
- River Hills Community Health Center
- Siouxland Community Health Center
- Silver:
- United Community Health Center
- Gold:
- National Quality Leader – Heart Health (1 awardee): awarded to those meeting Heart Health goals defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Million Hearts initiative. These health centers perform in the top 4% of all health centers nationally in heart health.
- Siouxland Community Health Center
- Advancing Health Information Technology for Quality (11 awardees): Recognizes health centers that meet all criteria to optimize HIT services. Health centers must meet the following five criteria: adopted an electronic health record (EHR) system, offers telehealth services, exchanges clinical information electronically with key providers health care settings, engages patients through health IT, and collects data on patient social risk factors.
- Community Health Care
- Community Health Center of Fort Dodge
- Community Health Centers of Southeastern Iowa
- Crescent Community Health Center
- Eastern Iowa Health Center
- Infinity Health
- Peoples Community Health Clinic
- Primary Health Care
- Promise Community Health Center
- Siouxland Community Health Center
- United Community Health Center
- Addressing Social Risk Factors (7 awardees): recognizes health centers that are screening for social risk factors impacting patient health and are increasing access to enabling services. Health centers must meet the following two criteria: collect data on patient social risk factors and increase the proportion of patients receiving enabling services between consecutive UDS reporting years.
- Crescent Community Health Center
- Eastern Iowa Health Center
- Infinity Health
- Peoples Community Health Clinic
- Promise Community Health Center
- Proteus
- Siouxland Community Health Center
- Access Enhancer (4 awardees): recognizes health centers that have increased the total number of patients and the number of patients who receive at least one comprehensive service (mental health, substance abuse, vision, dental, and/or enabling) by at least 5% during the reporting period.
- Crescent Community Health Center
- Promise Community Health Center
- River Hills Community Health Center
- United Community Health Center
- Health Disparities Reducer (3 awardees): recognizes health centers that demonstrate at least a 10% improvement in the areas of low birth weight, hypertension, or uncontrolled diabetes for at least one racial/ethnic group in the reporting period and meet benchmarks for all racial/ethnic groups in the areas of low birth weight, hypertension, and uncontrolled diabetes.
- Promise Community Health Center
- River Hills Community Health Center
- United Community Health Center
- COVID-19 Public Health Champion (2 awardees): recognizes health center contributions to providing critical public health services to health center services during the COVID-19 public health emergency, based on 2021 UDS data. The badge is awarded to the top 10% of health centers that provided COVID-19 vaccinations and/or COVID-19 diagnostic testing to the largest proportion of health center patients.
- Community Health Center of Fort Dodge
- Peoples Community Health Clinic
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