At the Daviess County Board of Health meeting held Friday, May 3, Community Access Project (CAP) program coordinator Suzanne Craig, made a request for $50,000 for continued sponsorship of the program.
The Community Access Project was designed to provide better quality access to healthcare for the uninsured and underinsured of the community with a collaborative approach between the prescribing physician, pharmaceutical company, case managers and other healthcare providers and facilities as needed.
“There are medicine programs for all incomes,” Craig said. “There are more than 5,500 medicines that people can get for free through pharmaceutical companies, but there’s very detailed paperwork involved in it — so people get kind of lost in the gaps.”
Craig said those 5,500 different medications all have different requirements, so CAP works with the patient, as well as the medical community, to fill those gaps and complete the necessary applications so that the patient is able to receive their medication for free.
The CAP program has been in place in Daviess County for nearly 15 years, with the number of donated prescriptions continuing to rise.
Craig’s request for funding would continue to help provide over $3.2 million a year in donated prescriptions to 1,485 individuals at zero cost. Since its inception, the program has provided $40.2 million worth of free prescriptions.
According to Craig, the state of Kentucky Prescription Assistance Program made a visit to the Green River District Health Department in March and informed the location they were the No.1 community access site in the state of Kentucky, including such cities as Lexington and Louisville.
“It really validated how well our staff was doing in terms of doing the heavy lifting in the community,” Craig said. “That’s why we asked for continued sponsorship of the program in the amount of $50,000.”
Craig went on to say that, for every dollar invested in the program, they turn $32.50 back into the community, with the average patient receiving at least $2,000 in medications.
Daviess County Judge-Executive Al Mattingly said the Daviess County Fiscal Court would continue their current contribution.
“I don’t know where else you’d put a dollar in and get a $32 return,” Mattingly said. “They would wind up in a hospital or a jail or on someone else’s doorstep if we didn’t have these programs in place.”
While the CAP program helps to provide a wide variety of medications, with recent Medicare and Medicaid changes, asthma, heart and diabetic medications have become that much more costly.
“Medicines, in general, keep going up,” Craig said. ”Diabetic insulin has gone up 300 percent in the last two years. We partner with the Daviess County Diabetes Coalition and they provide us with strips, information and meters so that we can reach that vulnerable population with diabetes.”
Craig said, although there are no income limits, part of the process is to take a look at the patient’s income and determine what they might qualify for.
“Many sometimes qualify for Medicaid, they just don’t know it,” Craig said. “A lot’s changed with it and we’ll go ahead and enroll them on the spot because we’re just trying to get access to care. We work with the entire medical community — we couldn’t do our work without the medical community supporting and trusting us to partner with them to get this done.”
For more information about the Daviess County Community Access Project or to request assistance with medication costs, call (270)852-2904 to set up an appointment.
