A family medical center is typically operated under a different set of principles than a hospital or doctor’s office. A family medical center is geared toward meeting the medical needs of an underserved population that likely does not have adequate insurance and has limited means of paying for the service. A family medical center will operate with the mission of providing quality health care to their community without regard to age, ethnic background or ability to pay.

With many people in the United States unable to afford healthcare, without a family medical center type of facility they would often go without medical care. This is also true of areas with high numbers of recent immigrants. These newly arrived individuals are often unfamiliar with the medical community and do not know how to seek the help they need.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC), one of the nation’s preeminent academic medical centers, is an integrated health care system that operates 1,154 acute care, rehabilitation and long-term care beds, outpatient services, and community health and information centers. The Medical Center has 20 subsidiary or affiliate hospitals and operates more than 100 outreach activities throughout the region, including satellite clinics, health fairs and consulting services. Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center provides a continuum of care that includes primary care centers, outpatient rehabilitation, dialysis centers, home health care and long-term nursing centers.

Although its primary service area is a 26-county region in northwestern North Carolina and southwestern Virginia, the Medical Center in the past year has served patients from 98 (of 100) North Carolina counties, all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and several foreign countries. The Medical Center’s component institutions carry out a joint mission of patient care, education, research and community service.