Featured Practice
People’s Community Health Center, Inc
People’s Community Health Center, Inc is located on 3028 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore, MD. The clinic started as a free clinic simultaneously with Berkeley Free Clinic on the West Coast. People’s Free Medical Clinic was the first freestanding medical center on the East Coast. Together, these centers were the first in the country. They were staffed by an all-volunteer group of professional and lay people. People’s Free clinic opened to provide adult medicine, pediatrics, gynecology and mental health counseling. People’s has evolved over the past three decades to become a full service medical, dental and behavioral health center accredited by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations. The clinic still operates its largest clinical practice within the original building on Greenmount Avenue.
The philosophy of the clinic is to provide affordable, quality, patient-centered health care to underserved and uninsured patients. Patients are accepted without regard to their immigration or socioeconomic status. Patients usually pay on sliding scales for services, but the clinic is also helpful in assisting patients with access medications and medical care. The clinic is dependent on financial gifts, grants, federal assistance, etc.
Dr. Rochester, who works as a consultant in the clinic, provides tobacco cessation group classes (Smoke Busters class) with individual therapy management and counseling on Thursdays; and diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and medication management. In addition, she has expanded the Smoke Busters class to include patients at the Helping up Missions Agency, where approximately 15 new patients with tobacco abuse and dependence problems are also seen bi-monthly, and they receive assistance and free pharmacotherapy for smoking cessation. Dr. DiPaula works at the Open Gates Center, and she is actively involved with the medication management of patients diagnosed with manic depression, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactive disorders, and heroin addiction.
Dr. Rochester and Dr. DiPaula are currently working with physicians to develop pharmacist-physician collaborative practices in a pharmacist run buprenorphine clinic, psychiatric therapy management, metabolic syndrome therapy management and tobacco use and dependence. The People’s clinic is an ideal site for student and resident training, where they get extensive clinical involvement and exposure to a wide variety of patients. The residents learn how to develop these innovative new practices.