Unalaska, AK – The Iliuliuk Family Health Center is now the first Frontier Extended Stay Clinic in the state and in the nation. Clinic director Sonia Handforth-Kome said they applied for the designation because they do more than a typical health center by providing services like monitoring patients overnight and providing emergency care. Until now, they could not bill for these services because they were not technically licensed to provide them, even though they are necessary for the community and the region.

"So that means essentially Iliuliuk has been providing emergency services for 37 years without being able to be appropriately reimbursed for them. It costs us on average between $700,000 and $1 million per year to be able to provide those services."

Now, with the new designation, they can bill Medicare and Medicaid for the services to try to get reimbursement. It is a trial program, so they cannot bill insurance for the services yet. If the three year trial gets positive results and the federal agencies decide that the clinic can bill for the emergency services, your clinic charges may go down.

"Being reimbursed for that kind of thing will actually keep other patients' charges lower because right now, since we're not being paid for it all, our overall charges in the clinic need to be higher to cover the costs of an un-reimbursed service," Handforth-Kome explained.

Clinic staff started trying for this designation 11 years ago. Being a Frontier Extended Stay Clinic also means that the clinic will be monitored for quality assurance to make sure they are providing good services and can handle emergency services not typically provided by health centers. Handforth-Kome said they have already been internally monitoring their quality for years.