CalOptima, the administrator of health insurance for Orange County’s poorest residents, will expand its street medicine program to a quartet of cities, doubling the number of communities it currently serves.
Starting as soon as next summer, providers will drive through neighborhoods in Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Westminster, reaching out to and treating unhoused individuals in those communities from vans outfitted with medical equipment.
Around 500 unhoused people live in those four cities, according to January’s Point in Time count, which surveyed people staying in shelters and on the streets.
Yunkyung Kim, CalOptima’s chief operating officer, said the goal of street medicine is to meet unhoused patients where they are and support them on their paths to secure permanent housing.
“For someone who is experiencing homelessness, dealing with chronic illness is often not the highest priority on a list of needs every single day,” Kim said. “They’re in survival mode, so we want to create a model where care goes to them.”
The mobile clinics provide primary health care, behavioral health services, substance use treatment and case management to people living on the streets and in shelters. Each unit is staffed with a physician assistant, a registered nurse, a mental health specialist and peer navigators for connecting people to services and programs.
Since a pilot launched in Garden Grove in 2023, CalOptima has enrolled 450 members in the program, and 1,300 have received services, Kim said. Some 62 people have moved into permanent housing through the outreach, she said.
Street medicine teams now operate in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Santa Ana.
CalOptima is funding the expansion to the four new cities through a two-year, $4 million investment to provide care to about 200 members, which Kim said is roughly the enrollment threshold for the program to become self-sustaining through Medi-Cal payment reimbursements.
Now that the partnership is secured, Kim said, CalOptima will be putting out a request for proposals for vendors interested in providing health care and support services to unhoused people in those cities.
The services are expected to launch midway through 2027.
In addition to announcing street medicine for the new regions, CalOptima also launched a new “care traffic control” center last week to better coordinate mobile healthcare, share resources and track outcomes across the eight cities.
Around 40 providers and staff are now working out of the center, a figure that Kim said is expected to double when the street medicine program expands next year.
Second District Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, also the current chair of CalOptima’s board of directors, said street medicine dismantles barriers of care and establishes a “more coordinated path toward stability” for the most vulnerable residents in the county.
“Homelessness does not stop at city boundaries, and neither should our response,” Sarmiento said in a statement. “Our growing street medicine network is a powerful example of what we can accomplish when we work together across jurisdictions and systems.”