March 28, 2024

CareMore Health opens its doors in Jasper County

Newton residents looking for a more patient-oriented approach can now go to CareMore Health. Services including regular physicals, vaccinations and referrals to specialists are available on Mondays and Fridays at Skiff Medical Center.

CareMore General Manager Amberly Molsky said CareMore provides holistic care to patients and their families. They focus on prevention and chronic disease management, as well as the social, emotional and personal needs of patients.

The California-based health care provider has been expanding all over the country to include places like Arizona, Nevada and Virginia.

Dr. Jon Van Der Veer, a Pella native, said CareMore spends more time getting to know the patient’s support system and overall situation to help come up with treatment plans.

“Things like do they have housing? Do they have access to food? Do they feel safe in their home? All sorts of additional things which when you are seeing people as quickly as a lot of the health care system in America does, you don’t get a lot of time to do that and in this model, we spend a marginally long time period getting to know people,” Van Der Veer said.

CareMore started working with Skiff Medical Center in 2017 moving east after opening a Des Moines clinic in 2016. When looking at a list of patients given to them by Amerigroup Health Plan, CareMore noticed a large portion of their patients came from the Newton and Jasper County area and since transportation for patients on Medicaid is a systemic problem, it made sense to expand operations to include Skiff.

Van Der Veer and other doctors associated with CareMore use the equipment in Skiff’s Specialty Clinic to treat their patients.

“Our clinicians are focused on a ‘whatever it takes philosophy’ in that holistic way,” Molsky said. “Meaning that we are looking at not just the medical aspect of patients as their primary care provider, but we are really digging into those psycho-social, those functional needs, the pharmacological needs as well as the pieces that may not fit into psycho-social you would think about, things like... access to healthy foods, access to clothes and shelter things like that.”

Van Der Veer said they see substance abuse cases, as well. He said CareMore is able to prepare patients so they are medically safe to be referred to treatment facilities.

When it comes to setting up treatment plans for patients, CareMore’s approach is to dive deeper into the backgrounds and living situations of the people they are helping. Molsky said environments and access to healthy foods differs from patient to patient and may impact the way a patient can follow a plan.

“At CareMore, how digging in and really understanding how social complexities access as well as dynamic impact their overall healthcare allows us to in partnership with the patient, create a plan that that patient will be successful on,” Molsky said.

Van Der Veer said taking care of people and knowing the environment they live in helps them to know if the patient will take the medicine prescribed to them or not. He said people will prioritize their scarce resources before they take the medicine a doctor prescribes.

Contact Samuel Nusbaum at 641-792-3121 ext. 6533 or snusbaum@newtondailynews.com