The newest Community Resource Center in Los Angeles County, which provides affordable healthcare and health planning, opened in Pomona Saturday, Nov. 9, following a ribbon-cutting ceremony held Wednesday, Nov. 6.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony brought L.A. Care Health Plan and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan together to improve L.A. County’s quality of healthcare. They were joined with local elected officials to introduce the newest Community Resource Center.
Francisco Oaxaca, the senior director of communications and community relations for L.A. Care Health Plan, and Kristen Cerf, the vice president of Medi-Cal Growth Strategy for Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, welcomed the audience at the event.
Oaxaca and Cerf together discussed the amount of work that was needed to create the Community Resource Center. “So many folks from both Blue Shield and L.A. Care have collaborated to bring this vision to life,” Cerf said during the opening speech with Oaxaca.
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The center is one of 14 locations across the county and the first one to receive the new model proposed by the two companies.
A “what you need to know” section on the L.A. Care Health Plan website gives quick facts about the new Community Resource Center, including the types of resources available to members, locations of future Community Resource Centers and the total cost of the investment: $146 million over the next five years.
Both Oaxaca and Cerf thanked the board of governors that will oversee the Community Resource Centers before introducing the next speaker, John Baackes, the CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan.
Baackes stated the goal of L.A. Care Health Plan’s original centers, called Family Resource Centers, is to provide adequate healthcare to communities that were in poverty. The new Community Resource Centers are to achieve the same goal, especially in Pomona.
There are 13,000 members of the Community Resource Centers in Pomona, according to Baackes. The new center will provide better care and increase face-to-face contact between both patients and doctors.
Following Baackes’s speech, Greg Buchert, president and CEO of Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, took the stage.
Buchert discussed the technological advancements at the Pomona location and the core mission of the new Community Resource Centers. “We’re taking care of individuals who live in families, who live in communities,” Buchert said.
The remaining speakers in the event were public officials and representatives of public officials to congratulate the L.A. Care Health Plan and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan.
Representative Norma Torres, D-Ontario, attended and spoke at length about what this resource center means to her as a Pomona native, as well as what it means to the rest of the state and nation, as centers such as this are part of the Affordable Care Act former President Barack Obama passed in 2010.
The new Community Resource Center is officially open as of Nov. 9 and is located at 696 W. Holt Ave.
For more information about the Community Resource Center in Pomona and all across L.A. County, visit activehealthyinformed.org.
