Five years ago, two small health clinics in Mississippi and South Boston embarked on a mission to provide high-quality health care to residents in their communities regardless of whether or not they could pay. Since then, that mission has grown into a national program supporting 9,000 sites across 1,300 community-based health centers and serving 23 million people, called the Health Center Program.

Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday that $169 million in ACA funding will be allotted to 266 new health center sites in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The centers are expected to increase access to health care services for over 1.2 million patients across the country.

These funds build on the $101 million that was awarded to 164 new health center sites in May 2015.

In a blog post, HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews wrote that health centers are on the front lines of transforming our health care system. “In health centers across the country, providers are working as teams to coordinate their patients’ care. As a result, patients are put in the center of their own care – empowered, educated and engaged to take charge of their health,” she wrote.

One in 14 people in the U.S. receive primary care from a health center. For those patients, the health centers are providing quality treatment — over 69 percent of health centers are recognized by national organizations as patient-centered medical homes, which is the most promising model of high-quality primary care.

Even though the health centers treat a sicker, poorer, more diverse population than other health care providers, they outperform national averages in chronic disease management, preventive services and perinatal measures, according to Mathews.

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