Ascension St. Agnes Mobile Health Unit

My name is Lisa Starkey. I’m the director of population health and community engagement with Ascension St. Agnes Hospital. The programs that I run oversee community health and prevention in the Baltimore City area.

With our mobile health unit, we are working toward bringing health to the community. We have a lot of issues with transportation and access to healthcare. We came up with the idea of working with Mission Mobile to have a mobile unit that we could send out into the community and get to the patients.

How the idea started was we had a grant through the state, and we were running a medical clinic inside a homeless shelter. That site saw about 75 people daily. After the year of that program, we were looking at what worked and what didn’t work well. What we noticed was not going well was the number of unique patients. We were seeing the same 75 people over and over again.

That’s when we came up with the idea of investing in a mobile unit so that we could bring primary care out into the community. In the early stages, we were doing research around mobile clinics, who was offering the best services in the area, who’s done this and who’s done it well. We decided to go with Mission Mobile Medical because they had the service package, including the lease option.

It helped us not dive straight in with the full financial responsibility and program responsibility. We had someone who was very well versed in getting the units on the road and helping us set up protocols. They also were accountable for the storage of the unit and the maintenance of the unit, and provided a driver for us, which we didn’t have.

When we first started out, the mobile unit was out in the streets. They were doing a good job. We were struggling to retain a nurse practitioner. In order to run the unit as primary care, we needed to have an advanced practice provider. Recruiting that position is difficult, mostly because we’re in Baltimore City, and it’s hard to get people to lean into unsafe spaces. But our heart and our mission is to go places where people are vulnerable. In those areas in Baltimore, we do see a lot of violence.

We were able to retain a nurse practitioner. The mobile unit at that point did much better. Going with Mission Mobile ensured that there were no gaps in service when it came to the vehicle. We always had a replacement driver fly in to take care of issues. We never lost street time.

If I had the opportunity to speak to somebody who was on the edge of making the decision, should they go with Mission Mobile Medical, I would tell them to jump in with both feet. There has not been a challenge that we have gone through that hasn’t been able to be answered or supported by the organization.