Arthur Center Community Health will open a temporary primary care and behavioral clinic at Montgomery City on Oct. 17.

The clinic will be located at 1225 Aguilar Drive, next to Achieve Fitness. Staff members will include Dr. Eric Kondro, family nurse practitioners Carolyn Canterbury and Ashley Arens and psychiatric nurse practitioner Victoria Sanford. Currently, a dentist is being recruited.

“We are excited about being in Montgomery City,” Arthur Center CEO Terry Mackey said. “We are also excited to bring dental services as well for the Medicaid population. We can serve anyone. We’ll probably be bringing a dentist and hygienist to start with and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

Hours will be from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Friday at the clinic, which will operate out of a construction trailer. Mackey said originally, the clinic was going to open in the middle of July before plans got changed.

“We were waiting on Ameren to energize the system,” Mackey said. “It’s been sitting there for a couple of weeks with nothing happening. So we’re excited to get in there. It’s not the fanciest building in the world.”

Construction of a 10,700 square foot facility started on Oct. 4 and will be completed in August 2023.

Arthur Center Community Health is a health center that is based in Mexico. Since its opening in the mid-1960s, the Arthur Center has grown to over 1,400 organizations across the country. It was named after J.B. Arthur in 1992.

Mackey said the Arthur Center provides accountable care, integrated primary health care, pharmacy and lab services and chronic disease management for illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension, HIV and COPD.

“We’re basically focused on primary care,” Mackey said. “We don’t do specialty care in general. We’re people who are supposed to bring primary care to our communities. We’re also very accountable in the sense that we’re the major source of health information for the federal government.”

Mackey said the Arthur Center has grown by over 2,000 patients since June.

“We’re still going to grow because not all of our patients have gotten in yet,” Mackey said. “So it’s been a bit of a transition issue to bring all of those providers into our building in Mexico. It’s a big building, but it’s not that big, so we’re pretty much wall-to-wall people right now until we get Dr. Kondro and Carolyn Canterbury full time here at Montgomery City. Ashley Arens will probably be part time.”

Recently, the Arthur Center’s behavioral programs were certified as community behavioral health organizations.

“What that basically means is in January 2023, we’re going to get a prospective payment rate,” said Mackey, who has been working at the Arthur Center since 1997. “That means whatever services we deliver, we’ll get a flat amount. We don’t really know what the flat amount is going to be, but it’s going to be about $200. So if we do multiple visits on the same day, it will be $200.”