When Dr. Chelsea Mooreland attended The Ohio State University College of Medicine in 2016, she was one of 10 Black students in a class of 280 – a stark contrast from her time at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college. She says her experience at OSU, however isolating, was a unique challenge that helped drive her forward.
Now, as founder and CEO of Life Cycle Direct Primary Care, Mooreland looks to provide more culturally inclusive care while continuing to open opportunities for others in the medical field coming from underrepresented groups.
“Finding mentors and people that you feel comfortable being vulnerable with to ask for help was extremely difficult going through medical school, and even in residency,” Mooreland says. “It just helps drive me forward to make sure that I am available to other young women coming behind me who are interested in medicine.”
Originally from a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, Mooreland, who is also a first-generation college graduate, says that growing up she had an interest in science and wanted to be an AP biology teacher. However, an introduction to medicine class in her undergraduate coursework changed that trajectory.
After completing her residency at OhioHealth Grant Family Medicine, Mooreland worked in community health and says she was disheartened to see the way care was provided to underserved patients.
“Most of my patients looked like me,” she says. “I found it very difficult to kind of make peace with that moral conflict on a regular basis.”
She saw 25-35 patients each day, many of whom didn’t speak English as their first language. Mooreland says she didn’t have the time necessary to provide everyone with the level of care they deserved.
After six months of this, Mooreland decided she needed to do something different; to think outside of the box and do something that utilized her unique skills as a Black woman in medicine.
That’s what brought her to direct primary care. Full-spectrum direct primary care physicians provide comprehensive and preventive care to patients and receive monthly or quarterly payments directly instead of through an insurance company, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Mooreland says this saves patients money while providing better access to care and better outcomes.
“Family medicine is a pretty broad area of training,” Mooreland says. “But it allows us to be kind of an entry point for families and for patients into the health care system and make sure that they are getting referred to a specialist when they absolutely need to, to provide care that is cost effective and time effective.”
With her answer in hand, Mooreland set out to open her own direct primary care practice. She
took business classes and used the free resources she found through the U.S. Small Business Administration to turn her idea into a reality.
“It was definitely a learning experience,” she says. “But one that I tremendously enjoyed.”
When it came time to decide when and where to open her practice, Mooreland says it took some time. She’d moved to New Albany after she first met her husband, Michael, and got engaged, but had concerns about the level of diversity in the community.
However, as her eldest son, Jalin Jackson, went through the New Albany school system, Mooreland says she saw the community grow, and watching the city develop alongside her family encouraged her to reconsider.
“It was continuing to diversify and all of the relationships that formed here in New Albany were really strong and genuine and people were extremely welcoming,” she says. “That’s kind of what sold me.”
Mooreland says she appreciates the welcoming atmosphere the community has cultivated in addition to the accessibility and intentionality of the community – everything from the farmers market and variety of restaurants to walking/biking trails and the public school system.
Ultimately, Mooreland wanted to serve the same community that served her family while treating patients who are too often underrepresented in the health care landscape, she says.
“I really wanted to make sure that even our minority community felt at home and felt like they too had everything that they needed right here in New Albany,” she says.
At Life Cycle DPC, Mooreland says, she wanted to ensure care at her center was not cost prohibitive to any patient. So, cost to patients is no more than 2 percent of annual household income for a family of three.
“We’re very intentional to make sure that we’re providing health care that’s accessible for most,” Mooreland says. “But we know that some families will still fall above that 2 percent threshold and so I wanted to make sure that we had an avenue to subsidize care for families who truly can’t afford it.”
One of the ways Life Cycle DPC does this is through fundraisers. Mooreland says she hopes to launch a golf tournament this year in continuation of that mission.
Additional community initiatives Mooreland hopes to launch in the next year include monthly sessions to expose members to different forms of exercise, an in-school health clinic and monthly prenatal care group meetings.
“As long as I’m doing it for the right reason and as long as I’m following the mission and vision that God gave me, I can’t grow weak and weary in what I’m doing,” Mooreland says, “because I know the mission is going to work out well, not only for myself and my family, but most importantly for the community that I hope we’re uplifting.”
Chloe McGowan is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at editorial@cityscenecolumbus.com
