Country Doctor has provided affordable health care on Capitol Hill for more than 40 years. Now it is finishing 2013 with a new attribute sure to be valued by area residents: convenience. But, in the rapidly changing economic landscape of the Affordable Care Act, the new clinic is about more than making it easier for the community to seek urgent care.

Opened quietly in early December, Country Doctor Community Health Clinic’s new after-hours Clinic — located next door the the Emergency Room at Swedish Medical Center – Cherry Hill Campus at 16th and Cherry and made possible by a partnership between CDCHC and the hospital — is already proving to be a valuable resource as an alternative to visiting the ER for a non-emergency or to waiting days to get in at a regular clinic where they may or may not be an established patient. But if the nonprofit walk-in urgent care clinic wants to keep its doors open over the long run, it will need to see a significant increase in its patient load before a $200,000 Swedish Foundation grant to cover the clinic’s operation costs for the first three months runs out

“This is something that wasn’t going to get much traction [before] because it could potentially have a negative impact on the revenue of the ER docs,” CDCHC executive director Linda McVeigh said. “But you know the world has changed, and reimbursements for visits to the emergency room that aren’t true emergencies are decreasing rapidly, just because of all the Affordable Care Act,” she said.

“You go in the ER with a cold and you’re a Medicaid patient..it’s going to cost the state, what, five-hundred dollars? You come to us, it’s going to cost the state at the most maybe one-hundred dollars, so there’s that excess cost related to ER visits that’s a big incentive to drive down.”

Continue reading →

A full contingent of Capitol Hill firefighters rushed to 22nd Ave E Thursday morning to a report of smoke at a 1909-built 22nd Ave E house but the emergency turned out to be only an overheated jukebox, Seattle Fire officials say.

Fire trucks streamed into the residential neighborhood in the 500 block of 22nd Ave E just before 11 AM after multiple 911 calls in the area.

Firefighters inspected the home’s basement only to find a light “haze” reportedly caused by the jukebox.

Let us celebrate the holidays and the end of another year on Capitol Hill with the story of Rachel Althouse.

The cynical may ask what there is to celebrate about a four or five-inch steel spike impaling your arm. CHS prefers the lessons of luck — and a positive attitude.

“I’m really glad that the reaction to the whole thing was so interesting,” Althouse told CHS as we caught up with her earlier this month. “It wasn’t a life threatening accident but people have been so nice and caring.”

In early November, CHS reported on Althouse’s run-in with a noodle machine at Broadway’s Samurai Noodle. A swarm of Seattle Fire emergency crews circled the small restaurant working to extract the noodle shop employee’s arm from the machine as a crowd gathered on the Broadway sidewalk.

“I was so in shock, there wasn’t any other processing in my brain,” Althouse said. “I just couldn’t believe it was happening.”

The Seattle native who returned to the city in May from college in Minnesota with a bachelor’s in Asian studies was stuck in a noodle machine.

To free Althouse so she could be rushed to the hospital, the Seattle Fire team cut through the four-inch spike that had impaled her arm. It traveled with her to the hospital where surgeons worked to remove it. As incredulous as Althouse had been about her predicament, doctors must have been equally shocked.

“The spike itself is four to five inches long,” Althouse said, describing the aftermath. “It was almost entirely embedded but had passed between my radius and ulna at an angle. It hit muscles — but didn’t go all the way through.”

As unlucky as she had been to get stuck, Althouse was doubly fortunate not to be more seriously injured.

“The first thing they did was look at the x-ray — it didn’t hit bone,” she said. A month and a half later, Althouse suffers no permanent damage — only a righteous scar.

She returned to work a few weeks back. The noodle machine still has its place in the front window following a repair and a few modifications.

“There is a little more respect for the noodle machine now,” Althouse said. She says she’ll eventually operate it again. She expects some helpful, teasing advice from her fellow employees. “Don’t stick your arm in the mixer,” she laughs.