Care that Comes to You: Building Trust Through Health Pop-up Clinics
June 23, 2025
>Building trust with communities that have historically had reason to distrust the health care system can be a perplexing task: Where to start?
With a grant through the Building Trust: Advancing Health Equity Grant Program, Claudia Fotzeu Toukam, MD, MPH, FACP and Darra Edwards, PharmD, MSOL/HCM have led an innovative initiative designed to provide health care to community members in their own neighborhoods.
“In the past, we have offered health fairs and screenings, but we wanted to do more to meet patients where they are,” Dr. Fotzeu said.
To remove barriers to care, the team at Southern Regional Medical Center started the Health-at-Home Community Pop-Up Clinic (HHCPC), which offers a residential based, holistic healthcare model with monthly pop-up clinics targeting high-density housing in Clayton County, Georgia.
The clinics provide:
- hypertension and diabetes screening services
- chronic disease self-management education
- medication counseling, and
- health-related social needs evaluation
The communities served by the HHCPC are primarily composed of Black and Latine residents, nearly half of whom are underinsured. The program screens participants for hypertension, pre-diabetes, and diabetes. Participants receive digital blood pressure and/or glucose monitoring resources and medication counseling. They are also set up with follow-up care.
Additionally, the clinic team screens participants for eligibility for a variety of social services programs to help address their social needs, working in conjunction with the Clayton County health department and EatRight Atlanta.
The results thus far are impressive. In just six short months, the HHCPC made 94 health-related social needs referrals for 79 patients. This clinic offered the first medical care that more than half of participants had received in the last year.
Drs. Fotzeu and Edwards have identified a helpful key to building trust with vulnerable populations: meeting community members where they are. Through this project, they can provide services tailored to the needs of those who lack access to health care.
As the Health at Home Community Pop-Up Clinic shows, trust can be built anywhere — on sidewalks and in courtyards, through conversations, screenings, and a warm, familiar, presence.
