Background: Surveying experiences of community healthcare patients since 2020 is fundamental to understanding the COVID-19 pandemic impact for the nation’s most medically underserved patients. It can be used to improve access and quality of primary and preventive care services. The Health Center Patient Survey (HCPS) was collected using one-on-one interviews from 2021-2022, resulting in 4,414 surveys from a nationally representative sample of patients from 300 HRSA-funded Community Health Clinics(CHC), Health Care for the Homeless(HCH), Public Housing Primary Care(PHPC), and Migrant Health Centers(MHC).

Methods: The 2022 HCPS collected patient demographics, health conditions, health behaviors, living conditions, healthcare interactions and satisfaction. Analysis compared the demographics, patient features, medical complexity, services delivered, and patient satisfaction measures for CHC patients versus other health center types.

Results: HCH patients were more complex, with greater health risks and utilization of care. More HCH and PHPC patients reported living below the federal poverty level, unemployment, and to being uninsured during the past year. They were more likely to report severe mental health burden (K6 scores) and daily desire for alcohol, report fair or poor health status, disabilities including blindness and deafness, and more frequent chronic health diagnoses like cardiovascular disease and hypertension. MHC patients were younger and less medically complex than CHC, but with less history of care or current treatment.

Discussion: The differences between different HRSA patient populations demonstrate that these programs are accessed by widely-varying populations with different conditions, levels of medical complexity, and different levels of resources to draw upon for treatment.