Seaport Community Health Center is Moving!
Belfast, Maine – Seaport Community Health Center (SCHC), a practice of Penobscot Community Health Care (PCHC), is excited to announce its future relocation from 41 Wight Street in Belfast to 53 Schoodic Drive (on the athenaHealth campus). The move is scheduled for summer. Seaport’s new facility will be a fully integrated patient-centered medical home and a “model for innovation and excellence.” The spacious accommodations will lend themselves to an expanded range of services, including physical therapy, pharmacy, and basic laboratory services.
Seaport will continue to offer integrated behavioral health, expanded hours (evenings and weekends), Integrative Medicine, and teaching of health professions students. Dr. David Loxterkamp, Medical Director of Seaport Community Health Center said, “We have always tried to balance practice innovation and the need to hold onto traditional values. Those values include a strong belief in listening to patients, giving them our time, providing continuity with their preferred provider, and developing long term relationships. Innovation simply means finding better ways to meet our patients’ needs. You will see this in the new building, as we bring together medical care, mental health, physical therapy, pharmacy, and health education. We will promote patient involvement and ownership of their medical record and treatment choices.”
The new center will serve both the wider community as well as athenaHealth’s employees. Seaport’s new facility is the first of its kind to be built on an athenaHealth campus. “We are thrilled for the opportunity to develop this unique relationship with our community’s flagship primary care practice; it helps us both fulfill our mutual objective to make health care work as it should,” said David Tassoni, Senior Vice President of Operations at athenaHealth. “Seaport is a model health center that has always maintained the sanctity of the patient and provider relationship which is at the core of everything our team and set of cloud-based services works to enable. This partnership is an exciting venture that will serve our community, our employees, and will help us work smarter across our entire network.”
Seaport Community Health Center will continue to offer primary care for the whole family and entire community, as they have for nearly 30 years. With the addition of Peter Millard, MD and Cheryl Deane, PA-C, Seaport is now accepting new patients in a timely fashion. Seaport has been an early adopter and leader of the electronic medical record, integrated behavioral health, and practice innovation. Seaport was one of 36 practices to be selected for the National Demonstration Project (2006), and among the original 26 practices chosen for the Maine Patient-Centered Medical Home Pilot (2010). In 2013, Seaport providers and staff earned recognition as an NCQA Level III Patient-Centered Medical Home. While Seaport has kept pace with the latest information technology (IT) and practice innovations, its providers still attend patients in the nursing home, make home visits, and run support groups for the elderly and those with opioid dependence.
Last July, Seaport Family Practice joined Penobscot Community Health Care (PCHC) and became Seaport Community Health Center. PCHC is a national leader among Federally Qualified Health Centers that overseesan expanding network of primary care practices in and beyond the Bangor area.