For N.Va. Health Care, An Injection of Funding

By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

When the doors of a health center in Loudoun County opened for the first time yesterday, offering many uninsured residents their first medical home, it was in part because of a small, now-defunct hospital in Alexandria and a complex court case dating back a dozen years.

Out of that shuttered facility and litigation, which twice was fought to the Virginia Supreme Court, came a charity with millions of dollars to spend across the region. Its singular mission: to improve health care, especially for people who have little.

And so this week in Leesburg, the Loudoun Community Health Center began seeing patients. Next month in Woodbridge, a new central pharmacy plans to start filling low-cost prescriptions for a host of safety-net clinics. From Herndon to Baileys Crossroads to Arlington County, the inaugural round of grants from the Northern Virginia Health Foundation is helping to add services and hours.

"You can have a significant impact," said Patricia Mathews, the foundation's interim executive director. "These are very important organizations in the community, and they're dealing with really difficult problems."

The $43 million foundation arrives on the scene as issues of poverty and affordable health care move further into once largely insulated suburbs. Despite its affluence, Loudoun counts more than 20,000 residents without insurance. Fairfax County might have four times that. Many are working poor, who rely on typically overwhelmed programs for medical, dental and mental health services.

They will benefit directly from the lawsuit filed in Alexandria Circuit Court in 1995. The state sued directors of Jefferson Memorial Hospital for wrongfully appropriating its assets after turning the decades-old nonprofit facility off Shirley Highway into a for-profit business. Not until five years ago was the case concluded, with the state winning a multimillion-dollar decree, and not until two years ago was the new entity created to shepherd the money.

"Undoubtedly, the entire community gains when the overall health of the community is improved and when the basic needs of one's neighbors are met," then-attorney general Jerry Kilgore said at the time.

Neither Mathews nor anyone else expects the $1.1 million in grants just disbursed to solve the escalating problems with health-care access. But as one of the few foundations in the Washington area concerned exclusively with local health issues -- one of two focused on Northern Virginia -- the year-old organization can work with others to tackle them.

The grant to the Loudoun center, the first in the county to offer full-time primary care for low-income families, was nearly 10 percent of start-up costs covered by a variety of government, business and other philanthropic sources. The $75,000 went "a long way" toward purchasing medical equipment and supplies, Executive Director Debra Dever said.

"We're already getting inundated with calls and patients who want to get scheduled," she said Thursday while attending to the final pre-opening details. "When you start looking at it deeper, the need is pretty unbelievable."

The foundations in this area have some substantial resources for assisting. The richest, the $92 million Horizon Foundation, formed in the late 1990s after Howard County General Hospital joined the Johns Hopkins University medical system, supports activities in Howard County. In Montgomery County, the Healthcare Initiative Foundation has seen its endowment hit $60 million; a recent announcement said trustees intend "to broaden significantly" what it funds there.

In the future, with local jurisdictions facing similar challenges with the uninsured, these and the other organizations increasingly may do more than hand out money.

"There's the potential to serve . . . as a real galvanizer," to pull people together and address issues expansively, noted Margaret O'Bryon, president of the District-based Consumer Health Foundation. For two years, it sponsored a series of meetings on barriers to health care, which culminated last fall in a pragmatic report calling for regional solutions.

The Northern Virginia Health Foundation hopes to move in that direction, according to Mathews. "It's about building relationships, about using your moral suasion, about public policy," she said.

For its debut, though, its board stuck to grants, given to 13 of the 55 nonprofits that initially submitted proposals.

The Arlington Pediatric Center, located in a former Pier One store off Columbia Pike, received $50,000 to boost the hours and counseling its clinical psychologist will be able to provide through the end of the year.

The award will make a "huge difference," said Executive Director Judith Fox. Most of the center's 2,300 young patients are Latino, many of them immigrants. Many, such as the boy who saw his sister get raped by the "coyote" bringing them to the United States, are dealing with past traumas. "It's absolutely clear our families need mental health services," Fox said.

The Northern Virginia Dental Clinic got $85,000 to sustain the care it provides low-income and uninsured residents. The Medical Society of Northern Virginia will use $150,000 on a project to recruit doctors in cardiology, endocrinology and other specialties to volunteer in the safety-net programs. It will start soon in Fairfax County and Alexandria, with a goal of 100 physicians signed by December.

By then, NOVA ScriptsCentral may have filled upwards of 10,000 prescriptions out of the new venture's converted space at Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge. Its $65,000 grant is helping to launch what essentially will be a clearinghouse for clinics throughout the region, which often have to scramble for money or supplies so that patients can obtain medications.

"They need consistent access," Executive Director JoAnn Knox said of the clinics, "so they're not going to the closet and seeing what samples they have available."

For a growing segment of the population, Knox considers the health foundation's prospects as important as ScriptsCentral's future.

"It is a very amazing amount of money being brought to bear," Knox said. The foundation "can leverage those resources . . . and be a real catalyst for others to come into the community."