Uninsured patients in Northern Kentucky will soon be able to see a doctor, get lab work and pick up prescriptions all in one visit, at no cost.
The Faith Community Health Network is expanding on its free pharmacy and adding NKY’s first full-time free health clinic. The clinic will be located in the same building as the pharmacy at 601 Washington Ave. in Newport, making it an easy one-stop shop for people to see a physician and pick up prescriptions in one trip.
The clinic’s opening date is Wednesday, May 13.
The Faith Community Pharmacy was founded in 2002 by a few local pharmacists in partnership with St. Vincent de Paul of Northern Kentucky. Those founders saw people regularly coming into their pharmacy and either only buying the amount of medicine they could afford or not getting the medication they’d been prescribed due to cost. The pharmacy serves uninsured and underinsured patients, so you can have insurance and still receive service. The clinic, however, will only serve uninsured people.
“The only difference between us and regular primary care is we don’t talk about insurance, and we don’t ask for money,” said Faith Community Health Network Executive Director Aaron Broomall.
Faith Community Pharmacy is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Its income is based on donations, sponsorships and money raised through fundraising events.
Broomall said the pharmacy has been growing about 20% a year over the last couple of years. In 2025, the pharmacy helped over 1,100 people with more than $3.3 million worth of prescriptions. That’s over 24,000 90-day prescriptions that they gave away.
The pharmacy serves 14 counties in Northern Kentucky, and the clinic will do the same. They also offer free mail service to deliver people’s prescriptions if they can’t make it to the pharmacy.
Broomall said the original plan was to open a clinic by late 2027, but then the Big, Beautiful Bill passed. The Big Beautiful Bill is how President Donald Trump describes large pieces of legislation he supports. The bill was signed into law on July 4, 2025, and had an impact on the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
“At the end of 2025, it was estimated that Boone, Kenton and Campbell had somewhere between 18,000 and 24,000 uninsured individuals, and by 2027, that number could be up over 40,000 uninsured individuals,” Broomall said. “We don’t have a full-time free clinic in Northern Kentucky for those individuals to turn to.”
Dr. Rob Tracy sits on Faith Community Health Network’s board and has been working with the network to open the clinic.
Tracy said many patients are going in and out of the health care system because of insurance loss, which then leads to additional hospitalizations and emergency room visits, because they don’t know where to access care or can’t afford to see their doctor.
He said there is no other true free clinic in Northern Kentucky that does both acute and chronic care management. Acute care is short-term treatment for things like severe injuries and sudden illnesses. Chronic care is the ongoing management of diseases such as diabetes and kidney disease.
The clinic also has a lab that can analyze blood work and other tests that someone might get during an annual physical. Those lab tests are ready in 20 minutes or less, so that everything can be taken care of for the patient in one trip.
“We’ll get the lab results back, we’ll determine a care plan with them, and then we’ll prescribe if prescribing is necessary,” Broomall said. “This is the other thing that sets us apart, that person is able to just walk right down to our pharmacy and pick up their scripts before they leave that day.”
If the patient has a chronic illness, the clinic will provide 90 days’ worth of medicine to get them started, and if they have transportation barriers, the clinic will deliver that medicine to their home every 90 days for the next year, or until they need to see them again.
Broomall said the clinic will also have a hospitality team.
Their job is to put people at ease. The network is also a Christian organization, so the hospitality team will offer spiritual care if the person chooses. In addition, that team can connect patients with partners to find help with things like food, housing, job assistance, job training, all of those things that also contribute to someone’s health.
The clinic will be staffed primarily with physicians, but there will also be some nurse practitioners and physician assistants volunteering their time. Tracy said they will also look into partnering with medical students so they can see full-spectrum primary care and administer care.
“Not only are we serving the community, but what we’re also we’re going to be educating our future physicians,” Tracy said. “I think it’s going to be a great opportunity to serve many niches in our medical community that need to be addressed.”
The clinic currently has four exam rooms, but has the room to expand. Broomall said future goals include adding dental, physical therapy and mental health services.
Tracy said one impact he thinks the clinic will have on the region is decreasing the number of people in the emergency room who are there seeking primary care.
“We often see there are multiple bed holds where they don’t have enough room in the hospital for those folks,” Tracy said. “If we can administer preventive care ahead of time, we can hopefully prevent a lot of these people from having to go to the emergency department with a very high cost of health care in an essentially free setting.”
Broomall said the network is predicting it will serve between 1,500 and 2,500 unique individuals in the clinic’s first year, with between 3,500 and 4,000 total visits. Further, he expects the pharmacy to serve about 2,000 individuals during the clinic’s first year open.
“We know that if you come to our clinic in the first year that will reduce your likelihood of going to the ER by 60% and your likelihood of being hospitalized by 70%,” Broomall said.
Paying a full staff to operate a clinic is costly, and one way the network keeps this venture afloat is by keeping costs low through volunteers. Clinicians, administrative team members and laboratory professionals, looking to volunteer at the clinic, can fill out the form here.
The clinic’s opening will start slowly, with taking appointments a few days a week. Eventually, the hours will be Monday through Thursday to coincide with the pharmacy’s hours.