A new wave of progress in healthcare is coming
EP Magazine * August 2013 * by Matt Holder, MD, MBA, Chief Executive Officer of the Lee Specialty Clinic and the President of the Academy of Developmental Medicine and Dentistry
On June 11, 2014, Governor Steven L. Beshear presided over the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Lee Specialty Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky. While this ceremony celebrated the opening of just one clinic in one city in the United States, this single event marks one of the most significant developments in healthcare for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in decades.
The Lee Specialty Clinic focuses exclusively on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Its core services include primary care medical services, specialty medical services, dental services, psychiatric and behavioral services, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and crisis intervention services. These services are provided in an interdisciplinary fashion, whereby the professionals who provide them communicate with each other for the benefit of the patient. The Lee Specialty Clinic also serves as a teaching and research program where students from any healthcare discipline can learn, intensively, how to care for people with I/DD. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, the clinic model is reproducible. Its funding model has been approved at the federal level and its coordinated through the Medicaid system. This means that any state that desires to create such a model can do so.
