FQHC Drives Personalization at Scale for 35,000+ Patients
By Blakely Roth | May 6, 2026
Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center (Kennedy Community Health) is a Federally Qualified Community Health Center (FQHC) that serves over 35,000 patients annually across 100+ Massachusetts communities. With a mission to “help people live healthier lives,” they deliver comprehensive care and wraparound services to a diverse population.
The organization faced mounting pressure to meet federal compliance requirements, maintain financial sustainability and deliver exceptional care with limited resources.
Ruby Pezanetti, Chief Operating Officer, says, “As a Federally Qualified Health Center, we have to balance patient needs with operational requirements. Our duty is to make sure that whatever solutions we move forward with are not only financially viable but also sustainable. With Clearwave and Vital Interaction, we’re seeing that value in action every day.”
About Kennedy Community Health:
- Practice Management System: NextGen
- Patients: 35,000+ Annually
- Providers: 57
- Locations: Multiple sites, school-based health centers and clinics in over 100 communities across Massachusetts.
Challenge:
For Kennedy Community Health, disconnected systems and mounting administrative demand had reached a tipping point—threatening both patient access and the operational foundation needed to sustain it.
Kennedy Community Health experienced major bottlenecks in patient scheduling, registration, communications and data compliance tasks. Over 80% of patients were physically walking in just to make or change appointments, and those calling in often faced long hold times. Internal staff were overwhelmed managing outdated, multi-platform communication methods, while administrative inefficiencies disrupted patient check-in times.
Pezanetti notes, “There were long lines creating backups across our schedule. The longer it took a patient to register, the longer it took for them to get back and be seen by a provider. We wanted to address these gaps and others with one flexible solution.”
Juli Dooley, SVP of Advancement and Communications, adds, “Keeping patient contact information up to date had been a historical challenge and left us unsure as to whether communications reached the intended recipients.”
Pezanetti and her team did their due diligence to uncover a proven solution to these challenges. Of the process, she shares why they chose Clearwave and Vital Interaction.
Solution:
To modernize operations and improve patient access, Kennedy Community Health implemented Clearwave and Vital Interaction to overcome ongoing patient and operational inefficiencies. The robust integration empowered patients to schedule online, complete clinical intake ahead of time and receive personalized communications—all in their preferred language.
Pezanetti highlights the impact, “We were impressed with the breadth of Clearwave’s platform right from the start, and the on-going patient adoption of these solutions has been essential for improving administrative and clinical workloads.” Going on, “The kiosk adoption rate is mind-blowing for our teams. We had a concierge at the start, but now patients just walk straight to the kiosk.”
Pezanetti recently shared the impact of these solutions on staff time and energy,
How Vital and Clearwave Help Practices Personalize Patient Engagement
Kennedy Community Health didn’t just improve operations—they transformed the entire patient journey, from first contact to compliance, with results that were immediate and far-reaching.
Patient kiosk adoption at top locations hit 96%, check-in times dropped to just two minutes and pre-visit clinical intake completion rates reached 88%. With Vital Interaction, Kennedy Community Health achieved a 47% patient reactivation rate just 60 days post-launch—bringing 1,749 patients back into care. These tools also enabled the center to deliver 35,000 compliance notifications in just 30 minutes, drastically reducing time and cost from previous approaches.
Dooley notes, “We’ve been able to lower cost plans and reduce unnecessary vendors by eliminating manual printing and stamps, and we have saved staff time by pushing urgent communications out digitally.”
Pezanetti shares the impact on patient accessibility, “We serve a patient population who speaks a wide range of languages. Working with a vendor that could partner with us to support that language capability was critical. That’s another major benefit to having Clearwave.”
Discussing operational compliance, she notes, “We know that certain annual tasks are getting done at the right time because of the automation Clearwave provides in the background. If there’s a consent form that needs to be signed every year, it will prompt patients during check-in to complete that form.”
Going on she says, “A key factor in getting a perfect score on our operational site visit is the sliding fee. During pre-screen intake, we ask for family size and household income, which are two of the elements that we must screen a patient for to perform a sliding fee scale. Clearwave captures that data so our staff can quickly provide those patients with the application.”
Dive deeper into Kennedy Community Health’s story.
Patient Engagement Results:
- 2 Minute average check-in times
- 96% Patient kiosk adoption at top locations
- 88% Clinical intake completion rate by patient
- 57% Dental Pre-registration adoption
- 47% Patient reactivation rate
- 34% Boost in reactivation rates
- 10% Increase in average collection rates
- 43% Bookings made after hours
- 1.3K appointments booked online, saving 108 hours of staff work annually
Engage Patients, Empower Staff: Real-World Strategies That Work
Meeting the evolving needs of patients, while navigating heavy workloads is no easy feat. Watch Ruby Pezanetti, COO of Edward M Kennedy Health Center, as she shares how to reshape the patient journey with the help of Clearwave and Vital Interaction.
Watch the conversation here, Engage Patients, Empower Staff: Real-World Strategies That Work.