 | | Q&A with Leslie Graham – Named Among Maryland’s Top 100 Women The Daily Record recently named Primary Care Coalition President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Graham to its 2023 List of Maryland’s Top 100 Women. The following interview delves into Graham’s views of leadership and how she got to where she is today. What qualities make for a good leader? A good leader actively listens to information from many perspectives, uses empathetic listening and targeted questions, and determines when, how, and by whom a decision is made. A good leader also sees and stays open to many possibilities while driving forward on the path that can impact the mission most. A good leader also values and grows their people. |
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|  | PCC Receives Medical Society Honor As Recipient of the 2nd Annual Sewell Award The Montgomery County Medical Society (MCMS) and the National Capital Physicians Foundation have named the Primary Care Coalition as the recipient of the second annual Webster Sewell, M.D. Access to Care Award. The recognition is bestowed on organizations committed to increasing access to health care for people in the National Capital Region, a mission Dr. Webster Sewell dedicated his career to achieving. Dr. Sewell was a Black Montgomery County physician who never turned away a sick person who couldn’t pay. His practice became primarily pro-bono. |
| |  | Photographed (l. to r.) are Carolyn O’Conor, M.D., chair of the MCMS Award Committee, Leslie Graham, and Carol Garvey, M.D. |
|  |  | | Donating Stock to PCC Can Save on Your Next Year’s Taxes With Tax Day behind us, this might be the time to figure out how to save on your taxes next year. Making a stock contribution to the Primary Care Coalition (PCC) is one way you might avoid capital gains taxes on the sale of appreciated stock while deducting the value of the contribution. Be sure to discuss your specific situation with a tax professional, however. The process works using a third party to receive the stocks. In this case, DonateStock is that third party, and contributors transfer their stock there from a brokerage account. DonateStock sells the donated stock and transfers the proceeds to PCC, which provides the contributor with a donation acknowledgment. |
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 | May 23, 4:00-5:00 p.m., Adaptive (Seated) Qi Gong and Tai Ji Quan, hosted via Zoom by Independence Now. Register here. May 23, 4:00-7:00 p.m., Better Health Through Better Understanding - A Community Conversation, Hosted by American Diversity Group. Come out for an evening of food and conversation as we discuss strategist to reduce health disparities, ways to remove barriers to physical and mental health, how to gain and maintain financial security, and more, at 12210 Plum Orchard Dr., Suite 214, Silver Spring, MD 20904. May 27, 11:00-11:30 a.m., Archeology Tour, Josiah Henson Museum and Park, a 30-minute guided park tour, appropriate for ages six and up. The $3 admission fee does not include admission to the museum. May 31, 10:30-11:00 a.m., Family Storytime at Wheaton Library, for children of all ages, 11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD 20902. June 4, 1:00-3:30 p.m., Afternoon Tea at McCrillis Gardens, ages 13 and up, 6919 Greentree Rd., Bethesda, MD 20817. The fee is $50 per person; register here. June 7-8, CMS Health Equity Conference. Register here for free virtual attendance. June 17, 10:00 a.m.-10:00 p.m., 14th Annual Silver Spring Blues Festival, featuring music, food, and drink, 916 Ellsworth Drive, Downtown Silver Spring. |
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| | | Don’t Judge. Understand Instead – How Being Perceptive Led to Mental Care Breakthrough in Montgomery County In the Spring of 2022, Sgt Chad Matthews was on his way to a routine call. An elderly person was exhibiting unusual behavior and was endangering his friends and possibly himself. What made this call different, was that Sgt. Matthews had seen more and more cases that he knew were attributable to mental health challenges. “Over the years, I had been engaged in situations where I could tell the person who was the subject of our investigation was not functioning out of malice. It was clear that they were suffering through some sort of mental health condition. They didn’t check the customary boxes, so I really didn’t have a protocol to handle these types of situations. And as we got deeper and deeper into Covid, I could see it occurring more often. More and more situations where the perpetrator wasn’t trying to commit a crime, but they couldn’t help themselves.” |
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|  | Lessons from the Trenches: Tips from Two Partner Clinics on Achieving Quality Measures All health care is not created equal. We’ve all seen that in our own healthcare experience. There are differences we can feel as patients in the way we’re heard and treated. There are differences that show up in outcomes, too, like how well providers do at controlling chronic conditions or following cancer screening guidelines. The Primary Care Coalition and our Montgomery Cares partners work together to make the quality of safety net health care in our community consistently higher across the board. We do so by agreeing on the indicators we measure and working together to improve performance on them. PCC releases the results of that work for the system as a whole every fiscal year. At quarterly Quality Health Improvement Committee meetings, our partner clinics can see how their organizations’ performance compares with their peers and with HEDIS Medicaid benchmarks. Recently, we touched base with leaders at our top performing clinics in hypertension control (Huixing “Kate” Lu, Director, CCACC Health Center) and colorectal cancer screening (Mark Foraker, President and CEO, Mercy Health Clinic) to find out how they approach quality improvement and how they’ve achieved these results. |
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