Medscape recently interviewed ACH’s CEO Amanda Pears Kelly about how health centers are poised to expand vision care services to people who have difficulty getting that care. However, according to a recent study, they have been severely underused and are facing an unprecedented funding crisis.
The study’s senior author Aiyin Chen, MD, and her colleagues at the Casey Eye Institute of Oregon Health & Science University, assessed 43 studies of performance and outcomes of health centers over a 58-year period. They found 65.3% of patients at these facilities and free clinics have concerns about their eye health compared with 48% of the population overall.
“The study comes at a time when community health centers known as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) are entering a climate of uncertainty, first with the Trump administration’s freeze on government funding — which reportedly forced some facilities to close or cut staff — and, more recently, with talk of deep cuts to Medicaid, which accounted for 43% of the centers’ revenue in 2023,” reports Richard Kirkner of Medscape. “The freeze has been rolled back for now, but the agency that sends grants to FQHCs may lose funding in March if Congress doesn’t renew the spending.”
The article reports that “Preventing visual impairment and blindness by expanding vision services at FQHCs is not just the right thing to do, it also confers significant economic benefits to the community and the country in the long term by reducing costs associated with medical care and nursing homes and lost wages and productivity.”