As its only executive director for the 25 years of Access Health, Jeff Fortenbacher has provided the community-based healthcare agency’s vision, inspiration and has been the driving force of a successful team the past quarter century.
Jeff was part of the community planning process in 1996 that created Access Health and then was hired to drive the bus that the community built to address uninsured low-income workers.
“We weren’t an insurance company and weren’t providing traditional insurance,” Jeff recalls of offering tri-share health coverage among employers, employees and government. “And within six months I realized that this wasn’t going to work as we were going to go bankrupt.”
Jeff came to Access Health as a psychological counselor working for community mental health, Hackley Behavioral Health and running a psychiatric home health care company. To make Access Health sustainable, Jeff concluded the members had to improve their health through behavioral changes … smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and more.
The initial Access Health Board of Directors supported Jeff’s move toward education and programs to improve health behaviors and eventually other aspects now know as the social determinants of health including education, social connections, financial security and the like.
“Insurance companies were doing things wrong and we were challenging their basic norms,” Jeff said. “We began doing what was clinically right and believed the finances would follow it. That is when we got into the psycho-social factors.”
First Board President the late Pastor John Grostic, Vice President Dr. Rem Sprague, Lakeshore Health Network’s Linda Baley and former Muskegon County Administrator Frank Bednarek were strong board supporters of the Access Health direction along with community leadership from business, the hospitals, community mental health and the county health department.
What Jeff and Access Health has been able to achieve was offering healthcare services at 36 percent less cost than traditional health insurance, hitting annual member enrollments of 1,200 in one program and 3,500 in another while providing worker benefits for up to 350 small businesses unable to provide traditional employee health insurance.
Access Health estimates it has saved $111 million in insurance premiums in Muskegon County over the past 25 years.
Jeff sees the future of Access Health being an “intermediate organization” that links local citizens with a communitywide effort to create support services from government, social service agencies and healthcare organizations. That Sustainable Health Investment Partnership planning effort has started with the National Institute of Health’s 10-year, $12 million planning grant that Access Health was awarded, one of 25 grants nationwide.