Nurse-Managed Health Centers: National Nursing Centers Consortium & Institute for Nursing Centers
Meeting the Needs of Underserved Patients
Background & Goal
More than 46 million Americans lack health insurance coverage and are underserved by the conventional health care system.
NNCC’s and INCS’s Goal is to provide primary health care, health promotion and disease prevention services to underserved populations in urban and rural communities across the United States where there are large percentages of the underserved and uninsured. The Institute for Nursing Centers (INC) maintains a data warehouse and tracks consensus based clinical and financial national data on NMHCs as well as evaluating outcomes of care in these centers.
Model Description
National Nursing Centers Consortium (NNCC) is a national network of over 200 Nurse-Managed Health Centers (NMHCs) nationwide, many of them associated with schools of nursing, serving 2.5 million patients across the U.S. They provide accessible affordable quality health care and critical health services to underserved populations while also educating nurses and nurse practitioners for the future. NMHCs seek to strengthen the capacity, growth and development of NMHCs to provide quality care to vulnerable populations and to eliminate health disparities in underserved communities. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services evaluation, NMHCs meet the criteria for safety-net providers, as defined by the Institute of Medicine and an essential part of the health care safety net in the U.S.
Evidence of Success
- Produces equal or better outcomes at equal or lower costs when compared with health outcomes and costs in the aggregate.
- Have higher rates of generic medication fills, and lower rates of hospitalization than similar providers.
- Published findings regularly
- Called on for consultation and advice from NMHCs as well as state and federal policy makers