The Community and the Problem
About an hour outside of Eugene you will find Oakridge, Oregon, where some of the kindest people around call home. But the people of Oakridge have a big problem: healthcare. The current healthcare availability in Oakridge is minimal and many barriers stand
in the way of care. There is one clinic open in Oakridge; however, patients can expect very long delays due to the demand, and don't have ANY local access to critical services such as X-rays.
The Oregon Office of Rural Health estimates that over two thirds of medical visits needed in Oakridge go unfulfilled. This, along with a severe lack of behavioral healthcare services, has led to numerous long-term, more serious health problems.
Additionally, individuals with Medicaid and Medicare health plans, accounting for roughly half of Oakridge’s total population, have nowhere to go. As a result of these basic healthcare needs not being met,
we are all paying the price. When someone ends up in the emergency room and can’t afford to pay for their visit, it means everyone in the country who is paying taxes covers these often preventable 60+ ambulance rides and ER visits per month.
Primary care accounts for roughly 90% of people’s healthcare needs. It is relatively inexpensive to provide, and should be incentivized to keep people healthier in the long run. However, these everyday healthcare services are not available
in Oakridge, and many other rural communities around the country.
The Solution
Enter
Orchid Health Collective. Orchid is a health clinic that, with your support, is only a couple months away from making Oakridge the pilot community for a new, more effective healthcare system. The healthcare system is very regulated and difficult to navigate,
but after a year’s worth of research, we have come up with the following solution: The Orchid Care model. Our model is different due to the following:
**We remove primary and preventative care services from the umbrella of health insurance, allowing us to provide these essential services at much more affordable prices. (Similar to car insurance, it doesn’t make sense for inexpensive, regular,
health checkups to be complicated by additional billing and administrative processes).
**We let our providers focus on helping their patients. The Orchid Care Model lets our providers spend more time helping patients and less time on administrative duties, allowing for longer visits and better quality of care. By not dealing
with insurance billing our healthcare team, including a Community Health Worker, will focus on (and be incentivized to meet) long-term patient health goals.
**Offer an affordable option for small businesses to cover their employees healthcare needs. Providing traditional health insurance for your employees can be a serious burden; however for about $50/month businesses now have a new option
to offer their employees.
**Orchid will create innovative partnerships with other health providers, insurance companies, and state agencies.
There couldn’t be a better time than now to be promoting a new model, and we have received serious interest from a number of potential partner organizations. In fact, we are working with insurance companies to figure out a way to provide primary
care to people with high deductible plans which is a group that is dramatically growing under the Affordable Care Act.
**The Orchid Clinic will operate as a Patient Centered Primary Care Home, meaning that we will provide coordinated mental and physical healthcare, with a focus on preventative .
Our innovative Orchid Care membership will, for a flat fee of around $50 per member per month, provide unlimited visits for all the services that we provide. Also, we will accept Original Medicare and Medicaid patients as a certified Rural Health Clinic.
One final aspect of our model that is extremely important to rural healthcare is that it will attract more physicians to Primary Care, a field that is seeing an increase in demand but suffering from a drastically declining supply of providers.
The Team
Orchid was conceptualized and is being founded by Oliver Alexander and Orion Falvey. Oliver and Orion participated in the Oregon Social Business Challenge in the fall of 2013 and decided to focus on health care due to its severe need of innovative solutions.
After taking second place in the state and meeting Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, Oliver and Orion continued to research and develop Orchid into what it is today.
The co-founders knew that in order to succesfully open up the Orchid clinic and enact a new model for rural healthcare, a massive collaboration of ideas, energy, and support would be necessary. Throughout the startup process Orchid has received the support
from a team of experienced advisors including previous Oakridge resident and Family Nurse Practitioner Mitch Boriskin, Oakridge pharmacy owner Laurie Patty, Direct Primary Care Entrepreneur Jon Broome, and entrepreneurship professor Ron Severson. These experts’
knowledge coupled with Orion and Oliver’s ideas and drive has built the unique Orchid model into what it is today.
