The head of the national organization that represents America’s community health centers spent part of his trip to the Alabama coast in downtown Mobile, touring a clinic that has been treating Mobile County’s uninsured and underinsured population for nearly half a century.
Dr. Kyu Rhee, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Community Health Centers, visited Family Health’s Downtown Health Center while traveling to Gulf Shores for the Alabama Primary Health Care Association’s 41st Annual Conference and Expo. He met with health center staff, with patients, and with members of the center’s Governing Council.
Rhee was joined on the visit by Libby Thurman, NACHC’s vice president of primary care associations and health center controlled networks. Representing the Alabama Primary Health Care Association were Mary Hayes Finch, president and CEO, and Sharon Parker, vice president of population health management and chief quality officer.
“We are honored to welcome Dr. Rhee to our community health center. NACHC is an important advocate and resource for health centers across the U.S.,” said Kelly Warren, executive director of Family Health.
Forty-Seven Years in Mobile County
For the past 47 years, Family Health has provided services to the uninsured, underinsured, insured and medically underserved populations of Mobile County. It operates as the clinical arm of the Mobile County Health Department, working in partnership with the Family Oriented Primary Health Care Governing Council.
The range of services offered is broader than what most people picture when they hear the word clinic:
- Primary care
- Dental care
- Behavioral health
- HIV early intervention services
- Nutrition services
- 340B pharmacy
- Social services
- X-ray
- Laboratory services
- Interpretation services
- Family planning
The Downtown Health Center, at 251 N. Bayou St. in Mobile, is the network’s main site. Family Health operates roughly a dozen locations across the region, including sites in Citronelle, Semmes, Eight Mile, Mount Vernon, southwest Mobile and along Dauphin Island Parkway, a women’s health center, a rural health center in Bay Minette and a mobile medical unit.
That geographic spread is not incidental. It is the operating model of a community health center — putting primary care inside the communities that would otherwise have to travel for it.
What a Federally Qualified Health Center Actually Is
Family Health’s sites are Federally Qualified Health Centers, a designation that carries specific and fairly demanding obligations.
FQHCs are community-based providers that receive federal funding under Section 330 of the Public Health Service Act and are overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. To hold the designation, a health center must meet a set of requirements that distinguish it from a private practice or an ordinary outpatient clinic:
- It must serve a designated underserved area or population. The federal government identifies Medically Underserved Areas, Medically Underserved Populations and Health Professional Shortage Areas, and health centers are sited to address them.
- It must treat everyone, regardless of ability to pay. No patient can be turned away for lack of insurance or money.
- It must use a sliding fee scale. Charges are discounted based on household income and family size, with the deepest discounts at the lowest income levels. This is a federal requirement, not a courtesy.
- It must be governed by a board with a patient majority. At least 51 percent of the governing body must be patients of the health center — which is what a Governing Council like Family Health’s is, and why a visiting national CEO meets with it.
- It must provide comprehensive primary care. That includes preventive services and, directly or by arrangement, dental, behavioral health, pharmacy and enabling services such as transportation, case management and interpretation.
- It must meet ongoing quality and reporting standards, including annual reporting through the Uniform Data System.
In exchange, FQHCs receive enhanced reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid under a prospective payment system, eligibility for federal grant funding, access to the 340B drug pricing program, and, for many centers, malpractice coverage through the Federal Tort Claims Act.
Family Health is also Joint Commission accredited and has been recognized as a Primary Care Medical Home since 2013 — a model built around a continuing relationship with a personal clinician and a care team, rather than episodic visits.
The 340B Program and What It Pays For
The 340B pharmacy listed among Family Health’s services is one of the least visible and most consequential pieces of how a safety-net clinic stays solvent.
Congress created the 340B Drug Pricing Program in 1992. It grew directly out of an earlier policy problem: after the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program took effect in 1990, drug manufacturers stopped offering the voluntary discounts they had previously extended to safety-net providers. The 340B program restored those discounts by making them mandatory.
Under 340B, manufacturers that want their drugs covered by Medicaid must sell outpatient drugs to designated covered entities at or below a discounted ceiling price. Covered entities include federally qualified health centers, Ryan White HIV/AIDS program grantees, certain specialized clinics and disproportionate share hospitals that treat a high share of low-income patients. The program has grown substantially; covered entities purchased tens of billions of dollars in outpatient drugs through it in recent years.
The savings belong to the covered entity and are not earmarked by statute. In the community health center world, they are typically used to hold down what patients pay at the pharmacy counter and to fund services that reimbursement does not cover — the kind of work that produces no billable code but determines whether a patient actually gets better.
The program is not without controversy. Critics point to limited transparency about how savings are used, disputes over duplicate discounts, and the rapid expansion of contract pharmacy arrangements. For a clinic like Family Health, though, the practical function is straightforward: it is part of how a center that cannot turn patients away pays for medication those patients could not otherwise afford.
Two Federal Quality Badges
Family Health was recently awarded two Community Health Center Quality Recognition badges from the Health Resources and Services Administration — one for “Advancing Health Information Technology for Quality” and one as a “National Quality Leader for Diabetes Health.”
These are not honorary. HRSA awards the badges based on data health centers report through the Uniform Data System, and each category has defined thresholds.
The Advancing Health Information Technology for Quality badge recognizes centers that use health IT to improve care. Its criteria include offering telehealth services, exchanging clinical information electronically with other providers, engaging patients through technology such as a patient portal, and collecting data on patients’ health-related social needs.
The National Quality Leader badges recognize centers that meet national clinical benchmarks in specific areas. The diabetes health category measures performance on a set of targets that includes body mass index screening and follow-up and control of hemoglobin A1c, the blood test that reflects a patient’s average glucose over roughly three months. A center must hit a majority of the measures in the category to earn it.
The diabetes recognition is especially relevant in this part of Alabama. Diabetes prevalence in Alabama is among the highest in the nation, and the complications that follow poor control — kidney failure, vision loss, amputation, cardiovascular disease — are precisely the outcomes that consistent primary care is best positioned to prevent. A badge in that category means the clinic is doing well at the unglamorous, repetitive work of keeping chronic disease managed.
Why Community Health Centers Matter in Mobile County
Mobile County is Alabama’s second-most populous county, and its health needs are not evenly distributed across it.
Parts of the county carry federal designations as medically underserved, meaning residents face shortages of primary care relative to population, higher poverty rates, higher infant mortality or a larger elderly population. Rural north Mobile County, the communities along Dauphin Island Parkway, and neighborhoods in and around downtown all present different versions of the same access problem.
Where primary care is scarce, patients do not stop getting sick. They arrive later and sicker, often through an emergency department, for conditions that were manageable months earlier. A health center network with sites in Citronelle, Semmes, Eight Mile, Mount Vernon and downtown, plus a mobile unit, exists to shorten that distance — in miles, in cost and in the willingness of a patient to go at all.
The enabling services matter here as much as the clinical ones. Interpretation services allow the clinic to treat patients whose first language is not English. Social services connect people to insurance enrollment, food assistance and housing help. Behavioral health integrated alongside primary care means a patient can be treated for depression in the same building where they get their blood pressure checked, which substantially raises the odds they will be treated at all.
NACHC, the Alabama Association, and the Conference in Gulf Shores
The National Association of Community Health Centers was established more than 50 years ago and serves as the national membership organization for the community health center movement, advocating for health centers that deliver affordable, comprehensive, community-driven primary care. Rhee has been recognized nationally as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare for 2025 and as one of the Great Leaders in Healthcare for 2026.
The Alabama Primary Health Care Association, which held its 41st Annual Conference and Expo in Gulf Shores, is the state-level counterpart. Primary care associations provide training, technical assistance, quality improvement support, workforce recruitment help and policy representation for health centers within a state. Thurman’s NACHC portfolio covers exactly those organizations and the health center controlled networks that let centers share health IT and data infrastructure they could not afford individually.
Community health centers depend on federal funding that Congress reauthorizes on a recurring cycle, which is why national and state associations spend so much of their effort on advocacy and why a visit like this one is more than ceremonial. The people a national CEO meets in a clinic hallway in Mobile — staff, patients, board members — are the constituency behind that case.
For Family Health, the visit landed in a year that also brought two federal quality badges and a 47th anniversary of serving Mobile County.