Dovid Friedman, M.D., CEO of CHEMED Health Center, an FQHC and member of the Quality Institute’s Provider Council.

How do you describe CHEMED’s role in its community and the breadth of its services?

First, we have an incredibly cosmopolitan community: a large Jewish Orthodox community, a large Hispanic community, and Italian, Korean and Vietnamese communities and many others. I grew up in South Africa, and I trained under apartheid. I learned that you cannot just look at the “African community” — there are 12 tribes with different cultures and languages. If we want to be successful here, I knew you must understand not just a person’s language but also their cultural needs. You can translate information into Spanish, French, Vietnamese … but that is not enough to truly understand the communities you serve.

And then you need to match the medical services to the needs of the community. I believe that primary care and specialty care must be integrated. We also provide dental care and medical services and behavioral health care. We looked at ways to keep people out of emergency rooms, which are costly and overutilized. One way was to have extended hours — 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays and hours on the weekends — and you can walk right in. No one needs to spend hours in the ER if you don’t need to be there. We hired board certified emergency physicians and had them train our nurse practitioners and physician assistants and we have on-site laboratory including stat labs, X-rays and even telemetry. We have more advanced services than many health centers.

What aspects of CHEMED’s model, in your view, are scalable to other health centers?

Here’s what’s important to me. In society today we don’t take enough advantage of learning from each other. I think we have some best practices, other health centers in New Jersey do as well. I invite anyone to visit us. Scalability is learning from each other and it’s a tool that’s not used enough. Often my staff will tell me what patients need. I say, “I want to hear directly from the patients.” I want the community to tell me what they need. That’s the best way of knowing. And I think too often we create solutions that aren’t solutions because we didn’t understand the problem.

How can CHEMED and other health care providers address the upcoming eligibility and enrollment requirements under H.R. 1?

The challenge of H.R. 1 is on many sides. People will be challenged with the more frequent recertifications. At CHEMED, we started as a social service entity, and we know how to help people navigate the system. That’s always been a mission of ours. We get a list of Medicaid patients up for renewal, we make it our responsibility to contact them.

And we are working with the community to identify community service opportunities for those who are unable to find work or cannot work. It will help the community and enable people to meet the new work requirements for Medicaid. We have always had navigators available — we have a team of 20 in that division — to help people navigate the system. It’s part of our DNA.

What is your top priority over the next few years to ensure CHEMED will continue to serve 100,000 unique patients per year?

I often tell my staff: be part of the solution, not the problem. But it’s also important to recognize that no single person or organization can be the solution on their own. It takes a lot of people working together with collaboration, communication, and a shared commitment to improving care. Our priority is to look at the issues on a broader scale and to be part of the conversation to solve those issues.

In the United States — and I am an American today — we often treat the pathology instead of the person. But people are more than their diagnoses. They have feelings, and the way we address those feelings influences clinical outcomes. Our job is to understand our community and look at how we can bring solutions to solve the problems. That’s the direction we want to continue moving in.

We like to end with a question beyond your professional role. Who influenced your career most?

The person who influenced my career most was my family physician. It was a different era of medicine — more personal, more connected. I remember as a child being very sick and close to needing hospitalization. My doctor came to my house three times in one day. He sat on my bed, held my hand, and showed a level of compassion that left a lasting impression on me. That experience shaped how I think about health care.