St. Petersburg clinic steps up to care for uninsured during the pandemic - Tampa Bay Times

ST. PETERSBURG — Nurse Practitioners of Florida, originally named Nurse Practitioners of Pinellas, opened in December 2018.

As with any new clinic, it has faced challenges securing contracts with large commercial insurance companies to expand its clientele, said Ronsha Brown, founder. But this year, it also had to address the spread of COVID-19 and how to best care for patients who are uninsured, including those who lost their healthcare benefits due to the pandemic.

Brown, 42, spoke with the Tampa Bay Times about how the pandemic has affected her healthcare business.

What prompted you to open the clinic?

I felt like I needed to give back. We care for clients in the community who are uninsured or low-income, and we have same-day service here, so it’s available to whomever may need to get right in.

How have you grown since you opened?

It’s been pretty trying with the whole COVID. It kind of pushed us back, but we took other alternatives such as telehealth and just tried to make things work. But due to our elderly population not being so computer savvy, we had to do a lot of phone appointments, as well. But that makes it a lot harder, because you can’t do a visual examination.

But for the most part, we can see that we have grown with different age groups. It’s been a slow incline, but we’re getting there.

Ronsha Brown, founder of Nurse Practitioners of Florida in St. Petersburg. [ Courtesy of Ronsha Brown ]

How has the coronavirus pandemic impacted your work?

In addition to trying to stay above water, a lot of our patients weren’t coming in, because everything’s closed down. Our business kind of went down for a moment, I’m sure like others. And we just had to take alternative routes, as I mentioned telehealth, to try and stay afloat.

Still to this day, we are having our clients call us when they arrive in the parking lot and let us know that they’re here. We don’t allow them to sit in their cars for longer than five, longest 10 minutes, before we get them in. Everyone is screened when they come in — the typical COVID questions — and we take their temperature, as well. We have two providers here full-time, and we get two clients in at a time. We have two waiting rooms, and we put them in two different waiting rooms.

We just started COVID testing in September. We were trying to put our feelers out there, as far as what we can do to help the community to expedite getting these clients tested and to make each individual aware of their COVID status.

Are you getting more requests from individuals without insurance?

We do have clients who are uninsured, and they’ve kind of been with us throughout the whole entire (time). But for the ones who have lost their jobs, we’re starting to pick up a lot more of them, as well. Even for the ones that are insured, some insurance we don’t accept, and they’ll still pay to come here.

Sometimes what happens is that we’ll get these clients who are uninsured ... they’ll sign a contract. And they’ll be on for like, four months, and if their health is pretty steady, they’ll send us a letter and let us know that moving forward, they’ll be ok for the next couple months. And then they’ll come back on if they start noticing more problems that they’re faced with. But for the most part during COVID, they just kind of stay on the plan as a safety net, I guess.

(The uninsured plan costs about) $150 a month, and they can get up to three visits. We draw their labs as the baseline, and they can call us for whatever questions they may have. ... If they have any problems that they’re faced with, they get three visits, or they can come in and see the provider. As far as their prescriptions, we try to go to places where they’re free.

What has the pandemic highlighted about the role nurse practitioners play in keeping a community healthy?

We, as nurse practitioners, and any other health care providers, have to be stressing the importance of safety. We’ve done it before, but it’s so much more important now that we’re facing this pandemic.

And we’ve gained so much more respect ... from the clients, because they’re currently seeing the struggle which we endure every day, as far as wearing our PPE and still having to keep a humble face. And professionalism has to always be up to par.

What are some of the longstanding health effects from the pandemic that your team is preparing for down the road?

The people that we encounter here in our clinic who have tested positive at some point, have some chronic residuals from shortness of breath. On exertion, they can only get so far before they have to sit down and take a couple deep breaths. And we’re talking young people; it’s not always our elderly.

What are the concerns for your business — both in terms of finances and in terms of safety — for the rest of this year?

Some of my concerns would be that there may be another mandatory shutdown. And it’s a concern, but it’s safety for me, my personal view. You know, we’re in the third surge, so we need to figure out how we can move our numbers back down.

But if we have to close again, we’re going to be faced with patients not coming to see their providers as they should as their routine visits. And again, we would have to do a lot of our examination 100 percent by way of telehealth.

Our overall goal is to open up in a couple locations throughout Central Florida. But that’s kind of up in the air with this whole pandemic.

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St. Petersburg clinic steps up to care for uninsured during the pandemic - Tampa Bay Times
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