St. Helena Star—Clinic Ole Thanks Thompson for ACA Support

Dear Rep. Mike Thompson: On behalf of Clinic Ole's medical and dental providers, staff and patients, thank you for your support of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Thanks to the ACA, hundreds of clinics like ours across the country are better prepared to meet the needs of their patients. As you know, Clinic Ole provides medical and dental services to 1 in 7 Napa County residents each year.

Since 1999, we have served the residents of Calistoga through a partnership with the Calistoga Family Center, where we provide some 600 patient visits each month. We opened that site â€" a modular unit donated to us by Queen of the Valley Medical Center several years earlier â€" on a shoestring budget, placing the unit on land owned by St. Helena Hospital. We used refurbished computers and dental equipment. We could not afford to have a dedicated computer server there, severely decreasing the efficiency of our electronic health record system. Our phone system is antiquated and our network is insufficient to handle the Internet traffic between Calistoga and our main site in Napa where the server is located. The modular unit's original heating and air conditioning system is not energy efficient.

Thanks to a capital grant we received this week through the Affordable Care Act, we now have the necessary funding to bring our Calistoga site up to our high standards, thereby improving the quality of care we provide our patients.

Once again, thank you for supporting high-quality health care for all.

Tanir Ami

CEO