INDIANAPOLIS (WANE) — Wells and Whitley counties have both opted in to the statewide Health First Indiana (HFI) initiative after each declining to join the program last year.
Including Wells and Whitley counties, there were only six counties across Indiana to not join the program when it first launched in 2023.
HFI will distribute $150 million in funding across the state’s 92 counties for the 2025 fiscal year. Wells County will receive $549,510, and Whitley County will receive $666,724.
“This historic investment promises to help improve the health of Hoosiers,” Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb said in a press release Wednesday. “I’m beyond grateful for all the local officials, health departments and legislative leaders who are embracing HFI and implementing new health strategies that will now ultimately be available to every Hoosier.
Each county’s board of commissioners voted to opt in to HFI, and then county councilmembers approved the budget, according to the State of Indiana.
Wells County Health Officer Brandon Huggins said the county initially decided to not opt in to the initiative because the Well County Health Department was experiencing changes in leadership and there was some confusion as to how HFI worked.
“My understanding is that there was some transition from within the board of health [and] a little bit of confusion from a county perspective on where this money was originating from and what were the requirements, and so they weren’t willing to accept the money at that point in time,” said Huggins, who became the health officer for Wells County in early 2024.
Amy Biggs, director of the Whitley County Emergency Management Agency, said the county wanted to receive feedback from other nearby counties and see how they each handled the funding before following suit.
“When the state rolled this out last year, we were aware of it, and we had what I would consider fair understanding of the expectations, but we were really entrenched with a lot of other initiatives that we were doing already locally that we wanted to bring to completion before we started something else,” Biggs said. “This gave us an opportunity to kind of sit back [and] look at how the program would be orchestrated amongst other partners [and] other counties in the state — specifically in northeast Indiana.”
After receiving that feedback, county officials felt investing in the HFI program would be beneficial.
“That kind of feedback was instrumental in us taking a look at this program, how they were implementing it, [and] looking at some of the hiccups or pitfalls that they might have experienced so that we can not make those same mistakes moving forward,” Biggs said.
For Wells County, which recently lost childbirth services at Bluffton Regional Medical Center and will see Bluffton’s Meridian Women’s Health clinic close at the end of June, the funding will allow the health department to expand a program called Wells on Wheels that could provide women and other people who need medical care with transportation to Fort Wayne.
“For the routine office visits, the service could be utilized, and we’ll help support that with our Health First Indiana funding,” Huggins said.
Wells County also hopes to use the funding to bring some women’s health services from Fort Wayne to the county and to assist the women’s health services that still remain in the area, such as Helping Hands.
Although Whitley County does not yet have any specific plans in place for the funding, Biggs said it will be a huge help and should allow the county to invest in certain areas that need improvement.
“We’re excited about that latitude that this funding provides for us and can give us that energy and funding to be able to focus on some things that maybe we haven’t been able to do before,” Biggs said.
While Wells and Whitley counties will be receiving HFI funding for the first time, the other counties in northeast Indiana received HFI money last year and will be getting even more in the next fiscal year:
- Adams County – $778,845.75
- Allen County – $8,960,782.50
- DeKalb County – $843,667.50
- Grant County – $1,550,170.50
- Huntington County – $714,909
- Jay County – $445,396.50
- Kosciusko County – $1,865,580
- LaGrange County – $879,700.50
- Noble County – $1,103,375.25
- Steuben County – $671,482.50
- Wabash County – $673,728
The State of Indiana has an HFI website that shows how much money each state is receiving along with county statistics for health issues such as life expectancy, obesity rates and child mortality rates.