The Columbia County Community Healthcare Consortium, Inc. (“the Healthcare Consortium”) is a not-for-profit corporation established in 1998 to create a network of health and human service providers serving the rural community in and around Columbia County.

The Healthcare Consortium helps people to get and stay healthy by increasing their access to quality healthcare services. We advance this mission through collaboration, education, information and service delivery. The Consortium’s current portfolio of direct services includes the Children and Adults Rural Transportation Service, or CARTS, which has been supported by the Foundation for Community Health for many years. CARTS provides non-emergency, door-to-door medical transportation to Columbia County residents so they can attend appointments with healthcare providers of all types, both within and beyond Columbia County. With help from FCH, this program recently enhanced its capacity to serve individuals with limited mobility by adding the multi-passenger, wheelchair-accessible minibus pictured below.

The Foundation has also supported the Consortium’s Prescription Access and Referral Program, which facilitates access to low or no –cost prescription medications. This program helps people with limited financial resources to access the medications that are essential to achieving and maintaining their health and well-being, in both the short and long term. It also provides information about, appropriate referrals to, and enrollment assistance for community-based services and supports that may help to address the client’s other unmet needs.

For more information about the Healthcare Consortium, please visit our website (http://www.columbiahealthnet.org) or call us at (518) 822-8820.