UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial Expands Access To Women’s Healthcare

UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial opened a women’s health clinic at its Harvey campus to provide access to much needed women’s health care services. Photo provided by UChicago Medicine.
UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial opened a women’s health clinic at its Harvey campus to provide access to much needed women’s health care services. Photo provided by UChicago Medicine.

UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial Expands Access To Women’s Healthcare

By Tia Carol Jones

The UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial opened a new women’s health clinic on its Harvey campus, with the goal to address disparities in access to care for women with complex healthcare needs.

The women’s clinic provides cervical cancer screening, contraception and menopause care, advanced care for high-risk pregnancies and minimally invasive surgery for fibroids and endometriosis. It will also provide treatment for gynecologic cancers.

Dr. Andrea Loberg is the section chief of the OB-GYN at the UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial. Loberg said there is a huge disparity in women’s healthcare access in the service area around the hospital. She said the hospital did a community health needs assessment and it identified that for every 100,000 patients who would need OBGYN services, Cook County has about 35 OBGYNs and the area around Ingalls has about 14 OBGYNs. That lack of access can result in healthcare disparities in maternal and women’s health outcomes. She said it is important for the hospital to address those disparities and improve those health outcomes.

“We’re focused on helping patients engage in care earlier and stay connected throughout their pregnancy,” Shanice Williams, the OB Program Manager at UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial, said in a press release. “That continuity is essential, especially at a time when access points for maternity care are shrinking in many communities.”

Loberg said the community health needs assessment not only looked at statistics but it also talked to people in the community and asked them about their healthcare concerns. Of those issues, cancer was at the top of that list. Loberg said it is known that there are disparities in access to cancer care. So, the hospital wanted to bring specialty OBGYN care into the hospital and right into the community. She said having the clinic address those concerns would close the disparity gaps that exist.

Loberg said that treatment for the gynecological cancers will begin in March, when Dr. Han Cun will start at the clinic. Cun is an existing doctor at UChicago Medicine, much like the other experts who will be at the clinic, who specialize in maternal-fetal medicine and minimally invasive gynecologic surgery. Loberg said that Ingalls is reinventing how it provides OBGYN and women’s healthcare, at a community hospital.

“Their partnership with an academic medical center allows them to bring top quality specialty care into a community setting, and their partnerships with the community clinics and their existing relationship with the community allows them to meet that primary OBGYN need, as well,” Loberg said.

Loberg said it is essential for Ingalls to collaborate and partner with community clinics, like the Family Christian Health Center. The model that Ingalls is building is to grow its primary OBGYN care and put prenatal care in the federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and share doctors between the hospitals and clinics. This way, patients can receive prenatal and primary care in their primary care home, and come to the hospital for hospital based services, like imaging, surgery, subspecialists and births. Ingalls is taking that care model and expanding it to other community clinics.

Loberg said that women who have utilized the clinic since it opened in December 2025 have been enthusiastic about having access to the services it provides. She said a lot of patients have walked in for appointments and are grateful to have access close to home. She said the maternal-fetal medicine has been one of the services with the most demand.

The other in demand service is complex gynecology – fibroids and endometriosis, pelvic pain and menopause. She said while in the past, patients presenting with those symptoms would go to the emergency room, now they have access to top quality specialists who can provide minimally invasive GYN surgery.

The new women’s clinic is located inside of the UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial’s Professional Office Building at 71 W. 156th St. in Harvey. For more information, call 888-824-0200.

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