NORTH CHARLESTON — Mobile health care provided by clinics on wheels has expanded across the country and might be an option for critical services like prenatal care in rural and underserved areas of South Carolina, officials said.
One Lowcountry provider has already received state funding to help acquire a new mobile unit.
Providing care out in the community might sound radical now but that’s where it began when doctors and midwives made house calls, said Dr. Mollie Williams, executive director of The Family Van and Mobile Health Map at Harvard Medical School.
“They came to your home and your neighborhood,” she said. Williams was the keynote speaker Oct. 19 at a mobile health conference sponsored by Roper St. Francis Healthcare and Boeing.
Roper St. Francis is preparing to launch a mobile medical unit in the first quarter of next year and with a grant from Boeing is doing the groundwork in the community to determine the needs, said Vice President Melanie Stith.
“We’ve already got our unit ordered and we’re ready to get on the road,” she said.
The Family Van’s first grant also came from Boeing so “I feel like we are coming full circle here” at the event, Williams said.
From a single mobile health unit in the early 1970s, there are probably around 3,000 now across the country, Williams said. More may be coming now that Congress has passed the Mobile Health Care Act, which allows federally-funded Community Health Centers to establish new independent mobile health sites.
But funding for that, and for the centers themselves, is dependent on resolving the current budget impasse, Williams noted.
Mobile units can not only provide access to care but build sorely needed connections with underserved communities and help build trust, Williams said.
“We do that by meeting people where they are,” she said, not only geographically but culturally and linguistically. It has been shown to not only improve outcomes with chronic illnesses like asthma and diabetes but with preventive services like screenings and immunizations.
Those are some of the services Fetter Health Care Network is looking to provide with a new mobile health unit, said CEO Aretha Powers. The health system, which serves Berkeley, Charleston, Colleton, and Dorchester counties, recently received $190,000 in state funding to purchase a new mobile clinic.
The pandemic has actually driven up the price of units from around that amount to now as much as $270,000, she said. The health system will go ahead and order the mobile unit, which are custom-made, but it could take around 10 months to deliver, Price said.
The legislature has been taking a closer look at the need for more health care in rural areas of the state, particularly those where care is lacking or the local hospital is struggling, said Rep. Sylleste H. Davis, R-Moncks Corner, chair of the House Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs Committee.
“I think that we need an all-of-the-above approach and I think one of those options that we need to include in our rural areas is mobile health,” she said. Those units could not only provide primary care but preventive services and screenings, which “always saves money,” Davis said.
She has been talking with state representatives of the March of Dimes about mobile units they operate in other states that can go in provide vital prenatal care for pregnant women. The unit in Arizona, which the Harvard group works with, has already been shown to reduce the number of unnecessary cesarean sections there, Williams said. That also saves money.
“That is something that we would love to have in the state of South Carolina, where we can go to these rural areas and meet the needs of the women there,” Davis said.