BUCKSPORT – The Bucksport Regional Health Center will receive a $195,207 federal grant to increase medical services mainly in outlying communities.

The grant comes with very strict requirements, according to Jack Corrigan, the center’s executive director. It requires that the center increase the medical care it provides by increasing the number of patients it serves by no less than 10 percent over a two-year period.

“That translates into 2,300 people,” Corrigan said.

The grant is very specific, Corrigan said, and requires that the center add 200 new Medicaid patients to its roster, 365 Medicare patients, 495 sliding-fee patients, 490 insurance patients, and 450 self-pay patients.

In order to accomplish that kind of expansion, Corrigan said, the center plans to target the outlying towns in its service area in Waldo and Penobscot counties.

“Transportation seems to be an issue in those areas,” Corrigan said Wednesday. “So we’re going to try to take our screening services to them.”

Since the health center already covers its primary service area well, Corrigan said the new effort will focus on attracting new patients living in the towns of Orrington in Penobscot County and the Waldo County towns of Winterport, Frankfort, Prospect, Stockton Springs and Searsport.

“We’re not going to try to replicate what we have here in each of those towns,” he said. “We won’t be able to be in each town eight hours a day, five days a week. But we can bring our screening services out to them.”

The grant funds are expected to be available by Aug. 1, but the details of the plan have not yet been worked out, Corrigan said. The center plans to appeal to officials in each of the towns to see if they could make space available in the town offices where the center could set up the screening process.

The idea, he said, would be to do the patient screenings at the remote sites, while doing the actual lab work at the center. Although he acknowledges that some of the patients utilizing the remote services will be existing patients, the plan is to attract new patients who will then become regular patients at the health center in Bucksport.

The grant program through the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services targets medically underserved areas and Corrigan said that one factor that may have helped the center get the grant is that the center has among the highest ratios of patients to clinicians in the country. The center’s rate is 5,657 patient visits per clinician annually, he said, which puts it in the top 2 percent in the country.

The new grant program comes at a time when the center already is involved in two renovation and expansion projects. The center is almost ready to send out a revised bid request for renovations and reconfiguration of the existing center building that will locate physicians and support staff in one area in order to more efficiently serve patients. The project also will expand the existing laboratory space.

Center officials also are planning for construction of a new building to house the center’s dental program, now located in leased space on Main Street. Plans call for the new building to be built next door to the health center on land that the town is in the process of deeding to the center.