In 2005, the Brevard Health Alliance undertook the challenge to expand access to primary health care services for Brevard County’s medically underserved citizens. We began operations on March 7, 2005 with a core team of 16 associates committed to that objective. As of today, more than 100 of us continue to focus on providing these critical services.

During the past six years, with the great assistance of Health First, Wuesthoff, Parrish Medical Center, and approximately 140 volunteer specialty physicians we have:

• Served more than 29,000 individual citizens of Brevard county
• Provided more than 156,000 Medical Encounters with  BHA Physicians or Nurse Practitioners
• Enabled more than 2,300 specialty physician appointments through BHA’s Volunteer Clinic
• Arranged more than 4,000 specialty physician appointments at hospitals or individual physician offices
• Provided more than 7,500 Nurse Encounters in BHA clinic facilities
• Provided more than 18,500 Case Management Encounters by BHA’s Case Management Team enabling patient access to specialty services, housing assistance, Medicaid application assistance and a broad range of other community services
• Enabled patient access to more than $16,000,000 in free diagnostic services provided through the generosity of Health First, Wuesthoff and Parrish Medical Center
• Enabled patient access to more than $15,000,000 in free medications through BHA assisted access to pharmaceutical company assistance programs or directly funded by BHA

In spite of these incredible accomplishments, the challenge to continue to expand our medical services capacity is formidable.  As you know, new physicians will be joining our Titusville, Barton and Palm Bay clinics during the summer.

In the next few months we will also open our first full-service dental facility in Rockledge.  The ability to begin to address our County’s critical need for affordable dental services is both gratifying and challenging.   A similar challenge exists with the need for BHA to offer accessible and affordable mental health services to our patients.