When co-founders Dr. Michael and Sandy Imburgia, together with their long-time friend and co-worker Susan Dillon, first began seeing Have A Heart patients in 2008 at an East End doctor’s office, they could not have predicted the growth and impact that the free-standing clinic has today. “When I started this clinic,” Dr. Imburgia recently told a crowd of volunteers at the annual Volunteer Celebration, “I didn’t know that so many people would care as much as I do about our patients.”

2018 not only marks Have A Heart’s 10 year anniversary, it is the one year anniversary of the Clinic at East Broadway. Just last February you helped us open the Clinic at a location more convenient to the patients we serve! Since then our consults are up 119%! By moving the clinic closer to the patients we serve, you made health care more accessible.

As we look forward to the next year, we realize we have so much more to accomplish. We will serve over 300 patients in 2018 and provide nearly 200 volunteer hours at clinics and community health screenings. Our Board of Directors and Committees are working hard to support the patients, the volunteers, and the clinic. We are making plans for expansion, and we can’t wait to share it with you! Here’s to another 10 years of making cardiovascular care free and accessible to the uninsured!

Have A Heart received a highly competitive grant award from Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) in 2017. JHFE’s Community Health Award has allowed us to build and implement a comprehensive database to track health outcomes for our patients, including our Coordinated Care Patients with multiple chronic illnesses. With this database, we can provide intense data collection and analysis to ensure patients’ needs are being met. The database also improves our ability to provide an elevated level of transparency to our constituents because we can report health outcomes with a higher level of accuracy.

Have A Heart has also received a generous grant from the Irvin F. and Alice S. Etscorn Foundation, a trust managed by Hilliard Lyons, Louisville. The grant will be used to purchase laptop computers for the Clinic’s Nurse Practitioners and other medical specialists to improve onsite patient care.

King’s Daughters & Sons Foundation’s recent investment paid for the purchase of Language Line Services to improve communications with our non-English speaking patients. Not only can Language Line Services help patients with scheduling appointments, it can also act as a translator during their appointments. This service will help our current volunteer translators reach more patients.

New funding partners also include the Heart’s Path Foundation and a $25,000 donation from an anonymous individual! Combined, this support will move Have A Heart closer to its goal of becoming fully operational in 2019.

Thank you to ALL of our donors and funding partners for making 2017 a year of immense growth and impact.