Featured photo: Dr. Aisha Harris is excited to be bringing Harris Family Health to Flint.
Written By Jameca Patrick-Singleton
Harris Family Health, a private clinic, will be opening in the Northbank Center in downtown Flint by early 2023. Dr. Aisha Harris, a Flint native, is excited to be bringing this clinic to the community where she was born and raised.
Unlike typical clinics, Harris Family Health will be a membership-based primary care clinic.
“I’m not going to be billing insurance,” Harris said. “It will be a membership-based, comprehensive primary health service for children and adults,” Harris said. “With that, you will get wholesale medications and discounted labs. Membership will provide people with these wholesale prices.”
In addition to lower-cost medications, patients will also receive non-traditional access to their primary care doctor.
“Since I will have a smaller caseload of patients, people will be able to get appointments quicker and I will have a longer amount of time to spend with them to discuss their medical care,” said Harris.
According to Harris, the typical time that patients are allotted to spend with their patients is around 15 minutes. Harris is planning to spend up to an hour with patients at her new clinic.
Dr. Harris feels that opening a clinic that is serving as a membership-based medical home in Flint is going to make healthcare more accessible to Genesee County residents.
“As I got more into public health and health policy, I realized that there was this huge gap of people who were just avoiding health care in general, whether it was because they didn’t have insurance, or whether they were scared of this bill that would come months later, people just weren’t going.”
Patients of this new membership-based program will pay an out-of-pocket monthly fee that will include unlimited visits to the clinic, longer appointments, wholesale medications, discounted labs and advocacy for specialized services. The fees for services at the clinic will be $30 per month for children ages 4 and up, $60 per month for adults under age 40 and $80 per month for adults over age 40.
“My job as a doctor is to improve your quality of life and I want to do that without the restraints and restrictions of the health system.”
Official enrollment in the Harris Family Health Clinic will take place in December 2022. To enroll, people can visit the website at HarrisFamilyHealth.Com.
