Community Toolkit: Finding a Practice Partner
What are the medical risk factors or chronic diseases that you are trying to address?
Who are the community residents that are most affected by these risk factors or diseases?
Where are these community residents likely to receive primary medical care in your area?
Answers to the first two questions should emerge from your community needs assessment. In some cases, once a community's needs are understood, your choice for a healthcare partner may be straightforward. More often however, this is not the case. Here are some tips for determining where high-risk community residents receive their primary medical care.
- Ask the community - Look for local community health promotion activities and organizations that serve high risk community residents and ask where they are most likely to seek medical care.
- Seek advice from other coalition members - There may be existing coalitions or other organizations that have previously affiliated with local practices. Seek out these resources and ask about past experiences partnering with healthcare sites.
- Consult your state or local medical association - Many professional medical societies maintain searchable databases of local practitioners or practice groups.
- Search the local yellow pages - As a last resort, search for particular healthcare practices or medical practitioners by specialty or location. Try an online yellow page resource like Dex Online, and use search terms like medical practice, practice group, clinics, or physicians (family practice, general practice, internal medicine, or pediatrics). This won't give you information about the types of patients served by particular practices, but it will help you start to develop a database of potential partners.
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