Bethesda Community Clinic (BCC) was founded in 2011 as a primary care, safety net clinic providing low-cost and free healthcare to the uninsured and under-insured in our neighborhood. In 2020, our County received COVID funds, which allowed us to purchase a mobile medical unit. We deployed our unit in November of 2020 and began providing free primary care services. We offered the same services and care from our truck as we did in our traditional clinic.  

After four years of building our mobile program, we started seeing stark differences between our traditional clinic and mobile clinic. We found that our mobile clinic was far more efficient, our patients became more compliant, and we removed multiple barriers to care. After a careful analysis, BCC decided to close our bricks and mortar clinic and become fully mobile. As a privately funded clinic, we rely heavily on donations and small grants to fund our program. We realized that our mobile clinic was providing care to the same number of patients per week as our bricks and mortar clinic – but with 1/3 of the time and 1/3 of the cost of operating!   

Transitioning from a bricks and mortar to a fully mobile clinic has great advantages, but there are also specific challenges that BCC had to overcome. Some of those challenges include patient communication, funding, fill-in services when we are NOT on the mobile clinic, and weather. We will share our solutions to these issues, as well as the actual data and statistics from our traditional clinic versus our mobile clinic – strenghtening the case for mobile healthcare in a new way.  

Learning Objectives: Compare data from the traditional clinic versus the mobile clinic Discuss methods for efficient delivery of mobile healthcare services Address challenges and opportunities of transitioning to a fully mobile clinic