Ijeoma Nwabara, Administrator, Internal Medicine Center of Northwest Indiana likes the new marquee
Edgewater Primary Care opens in Glen Park
Contributed By:The 411 News
Acquires two Internal Medicine Centers of Northwest Indiana in Gary and Griffith
Edgewater Systems for Balanced Living, forty years in the business of providing mental health and substance abuse treatment, held a ribbon cutting for its newest facility Tuesday – Edgewater Primary Care – having acquired the Internal Medicine Center of Northwest Indiana at 3535 Broadway in Gary.
“We’ve always talked about how individuals really need comprehensive healthcare. For 40 years we have provided mental health, addictive disorders, and child welfare services,” said Dr. Danita Johnson-Hughes, Edgewater President and CEO. “The piece that has always been missing is primary care. You can’t have good health until you have both – good mental and good physical health; else you’re not healthy.”
Combining both services in the new health center, Edgewater expects to enhance access to services, improve outcomes and quality of care, and also see lower costs of providing those services. Edgewater currently provides mental health and substance abuse treatment to clients in several residential facilities it operates and at its out-patient clinic at 6th and Tyler in Gary.
“We had clients going to one location for behavioral health and another location for primary care;” said Dr. Johnson-Hughes, adding “if physicians aren’t talking to each other, you don’t know what medications are being prescribed that may be contradictory to other medications.”
The Internal Medicine Center practice, started by Dr. Okechi Nwabara, has been serving the community since 1984. Dr. Nwabara will remain on staff as lead physician and medical director for the Broadway health center and a second Internal Medicine Center, at 1212 Broad Street in Griffith, which is also under the Edgewater umbrella.
Dr. Nwabara’s comments on the connections between physical and mental well being noted the importance of comprehensive treatment. “I’m their doctor, their preacher, their uncle.” Psychological issues, he said, underpin half of his patients’ physical health concerns and stem from depression or situations in their homes. “I refer them to behavioral health, but they keep coming back to me. Now that behavioral health is imbedded here, we can begin to make a difference.”
Indiana State Rep. Charlie Brown was among the public officials at the ribbon cutting and knows healthcare. He was there at the startup of the Gary Mental Health Center, Edgewater’s precursor and as an influential House member on health policy, co-authored the state’s Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) under former Governor Mitch Daniels.
Brown said the integration of services at Edgewater Primary Care will lessen people’s anxiety. “We know many refuse to go to a mental health facility. We need to educate folks that mental health services is not bad. If we don’t use them, we’ll lose them.”
The bigger difficulty “has been ironed out,” Brown said as to who would pay for the social worker or mental health worker. That came with the passage of the Affordable Care Act that required insurance companies to provide for behavioral health treatment.
And he added that Seema Verma, who worked with Governor Mike Pence to expand Medicaid in Indiana under the Affordable Care Act, was just named by president-elect Donald Trump to head the federal Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services. “That can only mean something good for Indiana, her home state.”
Story Posted:11/30/2016
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