One of Broward’s public hospitals is opening a primary care center near Hialeah

Michelle Marchante
·4 min read
2

Memorial Healthcare System has opened a new primary care center in northwest Miami-Dade, near Interstate 75, just north of Hialeah and Miami Lakes, with plans to improve healthcare access for a swath of the county that is home to more than 500,000 people.

The new center, 8649 NW 186 St., is sandwiched between I-75 and the Country Club of Miami, inside a shopping center with a CVS and Publix. A Memorial urgent care center is also expected to open in the same location in the coming months.

Memorial’s decision to expand into northwest Miami-Dade comes after its Broward hospitals in a recent year provided emergency, inpatient and labor and delivery services to 50,000 people who live in this part of the county, including Palm Springs North.

Memorial, which is one of Broward’s two publicly-owned hospital networks, says its focus is still on serving the people of Broward County — a new primary care center opened earlier this year in Weston, with another one expected to open in Plantation in 2024 — but it couldn’t ignore the need for primary care services it was seeing in northwest Miami-Dade.

“What we are looking for is for individuals to start doing preventative care because it’s not only costly, but it really reduces your life expectancy when you don’t get involved in preventative care,” said Melida Akiti, chief community officer and vice president for ambulatory care for Memorial Healthcare System.

Akiti said the hospital system uses a variety of strategies, including a heat map, which compiles ZIP codes of patients who visited the ER for primary care, and a social vulnerability index, which identifies areas in the community that have the highest need, to gauge of where it needs to provide more care.

What hospital officials found is thatmore than 15% of patients treated at Memorial’s Miramar hospital live in northwest Miami-Dade, Akiti said. And during the pandemic, 46 to 50% of hospitalized COVID patients at Memorial Hospital West in Pembroke Pines and Memorial Hospital Miramar were from northwest Miami-Dade. The two Memorial hospitals are closest to northwest Miami-Dade.

Now, the hospital is trying to fill the need for primary care in an area that is inundated with Medicare clinics, she said. The center, like all of the hospital’s other primary care centers, including in Aventura, are paid for by the hospital’s operating income and not taxpayer funds that go toward the South Broward Hospital District, the tax district that funds Memorial’s hospitals.

‘Opportunity to help patients heal’

The population Memorial is hoping to serve is largely Hispanic, a group that often experience health disparities due to various factors, including income levels, language barriers and being less likely to have health insurance and receive preventative medical care. To improve access to care, all staff at the center speak Spanish, and like Memorial’s other locations, provides care to all patients, regardless if they have insurance or not.

Melida Akiti, chief community officer for Memorial Healthcare System speaks at a “One City at a Time” community health event.
Melida Akiti, chief community officer for Memorial Healthcare System speaks at a “One City at a Time” community health event.

The center is open 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and offers preventative care and wellness exams to adults, including pap smears and treatment for chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. The center also has specialists for endocrinology, cardiology, neurology, pulmonology and infectious disease control. Dr. Luis Santana Lopez, who has practiced medicine for more than 20 years, will be the center’s primary care physician. Lopez, who was born in Cuba, is board certified in internal and obesity medicine and is also an assistant professor at Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.

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Akiti said it was important for Memorial to hire staff that understands Hispanic health issues.

“For example, if the person had diabetes, you cannot tell the person this is your diet. No, you have to take their culture and what they are going to be eating into consideration. You balance,” said Akiti, who is from Panama. “You don’t tell me ‘Don’t eat mangoes during mango season.’ .... But tell me, for example, well, you can eat one or two mangoes in this amount of time; give me a diet that is culturally sensitive to my culture.”

Dr. Luis Santana Lopez is the primary care physician at Memorial Healthcare’s new primary care center in Northwest Miami-Dade.
Dr. Luis Santana Lopez is the primary care physician at Memorial Healthcare’s new primary care center in Northwest Miami-Dade.

To make an appointment at Memorial’s new primary care center, call 954-276-5552 or schedule an appointment online through Memorial’s MyChart system. Staff at the center also speak Spanish.

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