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PrintLunch With - Medical director, OU Physicians Tulsa Community Health Clinics
Janelle Whitt, D.O.
Date: Jan. 4
Time: 11:45 a.m.
Place: Charleston’s in Brookside
Dr. Janelle Whitt’s patients can’t afford her. That’s fine with her. She and her colleagues just treat everyone for free — or as close to free as possible.
As the nation continues to debate how best to provide care to all, Whitt and the University of Oklahoma Community Health Clinics are helping spread affordable primary care to more than 8,000 uninsured or underinsured Tulsans who either delay or deny themselves necessary medical treatment.
Late last year, as the clinics’ medical director, Whitt accepted a $10,000 Spirit of Humanity Award from the American Osteopathic Association for her part in helping grow the OU initiative from one to 22 locations throughout the Tulsa metro.
The money will help fund patient education materials and some lab costs, as well as bus tokens because many patients have no transportation to the clinics, most of which are located in schools. Money needed even more because the now 60 percent of patients who are uninsured exceed the number of underinsured patients at the clinics.
Whitt’s affinity for this human population comes from experience and — you can see this — her down-to-earth affability. Although she grew up at 55th and Harvard, she gravitated to moonlighting in small, underserved towns during her residency and loved her first job with the Indian Health Center in Okemah.
“It’s who I get along with,” she says.
Many patients she knows on a first-name basis. It wasn’t until a nurse friend encouraged her to meet Dr. Gerry Clancy, dean of the OU School of Community Medicine and OU-Tulsa president, that she discovered what she’d been moving toward. He told her, “You do community medicine.”
He hired her shortly after — at what was then called Bedlam Clinic — in December 2004, when the lean program was even leaner. She morphed into acting medical director five months later and officially medical director in 2008.
Early on, Whitt would go into school clinics alone, she says, and do it all, including things most docs expect a nurse to do. A few months ago she also became medical director for the School of Community Medicine’s physician assistant (PA) program. She makes sure the residents and PA students she oversees get a taste of that lone-ranger experience, taking vitals or setting up a breathing treatment.
The clinics focus on primary care and patient education — helping people manage diabetes or heart disease, or learn to eat better or to stop smoking.
Then there’s reality. You can’t help patients eat better if there’s no grocery store for miles, or their neighborhood is too dangerous to walk in after work, or if they can’t afford their medications, Whitt explains. Some problems the rest of the community needs to help solve, such as the clinics’ six partner pharmacies, which “were doing what Walmart did before it did it,” she says, providing prescriptions for $5 a month.
I ask her, “Is community health one way to solve the health care crisis?”
“It’s not a cheap way, but it’s a little cheaper than normal,” she says. “We’re very efficient in our staff.”
But it’s obvious from the way she talks that changes in how we deliver care can make a big difference, whether a doctor prescribes a less expensive, but equally effective, drug or health care is truly accessible in all areas, perhaps walkable from neighborhoods, or future physicians change their attitudes toward the disenfranchised. The clinics have done that already, she tells me. Past students say they see the less fortunate in a new light. Whitt is happy with that.
“I’ve never gone on a mission trip outside the United States, but I get to do it every day in my own back yard,” she says.
