InnovationEx

InnovationEx @Community Health Conference

Agenda

August 16 | 11:30 - 12:30 PM  

TechQuity Tank 1  

In a twist on the classic TechQuity Tank, hear directly from companies participating in NACHC’s Inaugural Accelerator, a 9-month program designed to find, support, and scale groundbreaking solutions that directly address health center needs.  

The six Accelerator companies, chosen from among over 100 applications, will describe their solution and how it can support health center efforts to advance high quality healthcare for all. TechQuity Tank judges, audience, and companies will engage in a Q&A about how each solution could be adopted by health centers and their partners around the country.  

August 17 | 8:15 – 9:00 AM  

From Pilot to Scale: A Health Center’s Journey to Modernizing Language Access  

Community health centers serve multilingual patient populations, yet traditional language access models can introduce workflow delays, rising costs, and operational strain. As we continue striving to deliver high-quality care, our organization identified language access as both a clinical priority and a systems-level challenge.   

This session shares our experience piloting an artificial intelligence–supported medical interpretation model. Presented jointly by clinical and technology leadership, we will discuss how we evaluated the technology, defined quality guardrails, and engaged frontline staff.   

We will highlight lessons from the deployment phase, including provider and staff experience, change management strategies, device and hardware considerations, and workflow integration decisions. We will also discuss our hybrid approach, including when human interpreters remain essential.   

Attendees will gain practical insight into both the clinical and technical dimensions of implementing innovation in a health center environment, along with considerations for scaling responsibly while supporting high-quality, comprehensive care.

August 17 | 9:15 – 10:00 AM  

Innovation in Health Center Access – Direct Primary Care for Health Centers  

STRIDE Community Health Center recently implemented a Direct Primary Care program in partnership with a Management Services Organization, Amplifii. Direct Primary Care programs essentially function as a health care membership; they are an alternative to traditional health insurance programs in that “members” pay a low, predictable monthly fee to receive unlimited access to primary care services. When STRIDE realized that many of its patients would be at risk of losing Medicaid coverage in the coming years, the organization got to work collaborating with Amplifii to offer a DPC membership program that would help patients and other community members maintain access to the care they needed. During this panel discussion, team members involved in the rollout of STRIDE’s DPC program will discuss keys to program success, potential populations benefitting from a DPC program, important logistical considerations for other health centers wanting to replicate the program’s success, and lessons learned along the way. Presenters will also field questions from audience members.   

August 17 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM  

TechQuity Tank 2  

In a twist on the classic TechQuity Tank, hear directly from companies participating in NACHC’s Inaugural Accelerator, a 9-month program designed to find, support, and scale groundbreaking solutions that directly address health center needs. The six Accelerator companies, chosen from among over 100 applications, will describe their solution and how it can support health center efforts to advance high quality healthcare for all. TechQuity Tank judges, audience, and companies will engage in a Q&A about how each solution could be adopted by health centers and their partners around the country.  

August 17 | 2:00 – 2:45 PM  

Responding to Community Needs Through Health Center-led Science 

This session will explore the field of what we call health center-led science—the body of knowledge that comes from research and evaluation that is built on community health center expertise and leadership for the purpose of remaining responsive to community health needs, and improving health and health promoting policies.   

Our session will highlight the principles of health center-led science through two distinct examples of collaborations between community health centers and a PCA’s in-house research and evaluation institute, presented by the health center leaders on these projects. Brockton Neighborhood Health Cente will discuss a unique partnership in which they engaged in a learning collaborative, working within their health centers and with each other, to create innovative digital screening and population health tools with the goal of improving maternal and child health outcomes.    

Health center-led science presents a novel framework that taps into a rich history of community health center engagement in research and science. This session highlights the ways in which community health centers, through their deep community knowledge and healthcare expertise, are well-positioned to engage in research and science to understand, and respond to, evolving community needs. In doing so, health-center led science may open doors for new revenue streams and workforce roles in our ever-changing landscape.  

August 17 | 3:45 – 4:30 PM  

Trust and Transparency in Community Health Care: Real‑World Use of the AI Vendor Disclosure Framework  

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in healthcare delivery, health centers face a critical but often under-supported challenge: how to ensure responsible and thorough due diligence of AI vendor products before procurement. The AI Vendor Disclosure Framework, developed by the Health AI Partnership, a national multi-stakeholder collaborative, is freely available at healthaipartnership.org and offers structured guidance across five domains: system capabilities, performance and compliance, data stewardship, integration requirements, and lifecycle management. It is a communication tool that promotes transparency between healthcare delivery organizations and AI vendors in practice.   

Early feasibility assessments reveal under-resourced health centers are less likely to ask certain questions in the framework, highlighting knowledge gaps and limited capacity to interpret vendor responses. Additionally, phases of the AI lifecycle that are rarely addressed in procurement conversations are becoming visible. Attendees will leave with a practical, community-informed resource that would help surface critical information — cost structures, implementation lift, performance and impact metrics— that vendors may not proactively disclose, and that under-resourced health centers cannot afford to overlook.