By Melisa Franklin, Vice President of Seven Corners Healthcare

It seems we’re all being asked to do more with less these days. To do more (and increase revenue, if we’re honest), while still delivering excellent patient care, we have to get creative. Fortunately, there’s one unique field you might not have considered and it’s ripe with opportunity: correctional health.

What Is Correctional Health?

To use the CDC’s wording, “Correctional health encompasses all aspects of health and well-being for adults and juveniles who are justice system-involved.” The goal of correctional health, regardless of the angle from which you approach healthcare, is to help these individuals be healthy during their incarceration and upon reentry to their communities.

Inmates are entitled to medical care, and the government ensures that they receive that care. It does this by frequently relying on third parties for health services. The right correctional health partner helps both the prison and providers manage those services, removing many of the administrative challenges—scheduling, seeking payment, completing paperwork—that providers might otherwise face when working with the inmate population on their own.

Who Works in Correctional Health?

Correctional health is frequently viewed as a piece of community health, and many types of professionals are involved in administering this care. Public health professionals, physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and private companies delivering diagnostic services are just a few.

Seven Corners Healthcare works with 27 prisons, coordinating care for more than 40,500 inmates across the country, and no two of those facilities have exactly the same needs. In a single day, account coordinators might schedule a gastroenterology appointment in the physician’s office, a telehealth session for mental health, an imaging appointment for mobile radiology and an on-site appointment with a podiatrist.

Incarcerated individuals often experience higher rates of HIV, viral hepatitis, tuberculosis and other diseases or conditions. Plus, they may enter the justice system not having had adequate healthcare in the past, meaning they have a wide range of needs, much like the general population.

"90 percent of my patients have been either shot or stabbed,” says Audrey Morrell, a physical therapist who works as an independent contractor at FCI Williamsburg. “They may have had surgery, but they’ve had no therapy from it. A lot of times, I’m seeing old injuries.”

Conditions aren’t always as shocking as that, though. BetterNight is a virtual sleep clinic that sends test units to patients in order to diagnose sleep disorders. The company works with providers of all kinds, including those in correctional health because, as Bill Kleiman, BetterNight’s Vice President of Business Development, points out, “Sleep apnea doesn’t have a mind of its own. It doesn’t say, ‘Inmates don’t have sleep apnea because they’re inmates.’”

And making treatment for sleep apnea possible does more than just benefit the person with the PAP machine. “Cellmates, other people who are close by to this inmate, may be really suffering, too,” Kleiman says. “Typically, bed partners are the ones who suffer just as bad as the one with sleep apnea because of all the choking and snoring that goes on during the night.”

Correctional health is not a single field, but rather a conglomeration of all specialties delivering necessary and life-changing care.

Are You Ready to Rethink Correctional Health?

Few fields change as rapidly as healthcare, and not just in terms of treatments. How to run a practice and find new revenue opportunities all while continuing to deliver exceptional patient care is constantly evolving. Correctional healthcare can be part of that evolution. The opportunities to see patients—some of whom have a deep history of being ignored and underserved—at the correctional facility, in-office, or via telemedicine or mobile units is expanding daily. It’s time to rethink your role in correctional health.

Melisa Franklin is the Vice President of Seven Corners Healthcare, building trusted relationships and driving growth for the business and its partners for 11 years. Seven Corners Healthcare is the largest third-party administrator of federal inmate healthcare in the country.