Known as Cherry Street Health Services for the past 25 years, the medical provider that now has 23 locations throughout the state of Michigan is much bigger than it was when it opened its first location at 500 Cherry Street in 1989.
Over the past decade, the recently renamed
Cherry Health has opened a new clinic every two years on average, most recently in February 2013 with the
Barry County Community Health Center in Hastings, which plans to add dental services to its existing behavioral health services in the coming months.
"We've had a pretty significant impact on the area, so we thought it was time we helped people appreciate who we are as Cherry Health, which has grown out of what has been Cherry Street Health Services for the past 25 years," says Michael Reagan, chief external affairs officer with Cherry Health.
Cherry Health has created jobs alongside the past two decades of growth in location and service expansion, most notably following the 2011 merger with Proaction Behavioral Health Alliance and Touchstone innovare, when the organization more than doubled its staff from 250 employees to what is now around 800.
"Whenever we begin to establish a new health center or whenever even Proaction or Touchstone began to expand, we were adding local employment opportunities for health professionals both in the entry level and more advanced professional staff," Reagan says, using the 20-30 new jobs created with the opening of both the
Montcalm Area Health Center in Greenville and the Barry Community Health Center as an example. "It gives an important diversity to the labor market in each of the communities that we serve."
Reagan attributes much of Cherry Health's success and its steady growth to two key factors: the first being its awareness of community needs, its documentation of those needs and its competitive approach to demonstrating those needs to funders; and secondly, accounting for a wide spectrum of primary care health issues and behavior health issues with integrated care practices, including both mental illness as well as substance abuse disorders.
"Over the years we've always looked at what the needs of the community were, in terms of those who were medically underserved and didn't have access to care and they were quite successful," he says. "By going after competitive federal grants in some cases state grants that have helped sustain that growth where they were expanding every few years with a new health center."
Currently, Reagan says Cherry Health is waiting on the verdict of a proposal still pending with the federal government to open a new health center in Eaton County. The organization is also looking at opening two school-based health centers; one at Innovation Central within the Grand Rapids Public School System and another in Cedar Springs, however Reagan says neither of the school-based health centers are concrete plans at this time.
Cherry Health is the largest Federally Qualified Health Center in Michigan, serving over 60,000 patients annually with over 60 physicians and mid-level providers in four Michigan counties.
Click here to see current job openings at Cherry Health, or click on the "careers" tab to learn more about job opportunities at its various clinics throughout the state.
Written by Anya Zentmeyer, Development News Editor
Images courtesy of Cherry Health
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