Two High-Quality Community Health Centers Become Stronger Together

NEWS STATEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 1, 2014

Contacts:

Maureen Maxwell, CCHN
(303) 867-9530
(303) 913-9078 (mobile)
Maureen@cchn.org


Statement attributable to
Annette Kowal
Chief Executive Officer
Colorado Community Health Network (CCHN)

DENVER― “Today we are seeing the exciting merger of two high-quality Community Health Centers (CHC) who together will provide even greater access to primary care.  The merged organization, to be called Peak Vista Community Health Centers, will combine the best facets of a CHC serving a large urban-and-mountain area of Colorado with smaller-but-geographically-widespread CHC serving our Eastern Colorado rural population. Together, the merged CHCs can better meet the needs of the communities they serve.

“Each founded in the 1970s, the two CHCs provide primary health care to a broad swath of Colorado. They are both federally qualified Community Health Centers, a health care model dedicated to providing comprehensive, high-quality, primary health care to communities and populations that otherwise are medically underserved. Peak Vista Community Health Centers cares for 70,500 people within the Pikes Peak region through 21 outpatient centers in El Paso and Teller counties. Plains Medical Center cares for more than 9,400 patients in Eastern Colorado in a service area that extends over 5,000 square miles.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the merged CHC in our shared goal to increase access to high-quality health care for people in need in Colorado.”

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To interview Ms. Kowal, please contact Maureen Maxwell at (303) 867-9530, or maureen@cchn.org.

For more information about Peak Vista Community Health Centers, please contact Randy Hylton, Director of Communications, (719) 310-3093, Randy.Hylton@PeakVista.org, or visit http://www.peakvista.org/.

The Colorado Community Health Network (CCHN) is the unified voice for Colorado’s 18 Community Health Centers (CHCs) and their patients. CHCs provide a health care home to more than 600,000 of their community members – one in 10 people in Colorado – from 60 of the state’s 64 counties. Withouth CHCs, hundreds of thousands of Colorado’s low-income families and individuals would have no regular source of