Full Circle: Celebrating 8 Years on State Avenue

A letter from Tara Kelly Zettel, President/CEO

Connect is celebrating 8 years since opening the doors to Suite E at our home on State Avenue! When a new location with increased accessibility, visibility, and opportunity became available, the Family of Support paved the way for us to make a move. With your help, the mission has continued to meet needs in and around the Dickinson community, expanding our space, offering additional services, and growing our team to offer the most dignifying experience possible. And now, we are preparing for a new season.

When I was hired in May 2018, Katie Vidmar and Deb Bolin handed me a bin of policy templates and my first major assignment: to begin preparing Connect Medical Clinic for AAAHC accreditation. Almost exactly at the same time, everything began to change.

The clinic moved, rebranded, expanded its services, and opened in this new location in the summer of 2018. Accreditation focus was put on hold as we focused on building what Connect was becoming.

Fast forward to the fall of 2022. Now serving as Director of Connect, I brought in a consultant to help us pick that work back up and move toward AAAHC accreditation. Then, you guessed it, in January 2023, Dr. Arnold told me he wanted to practice alongside Rachael Marshall, FNP-C, here at Connect, and Suite F became available. Over the next year, we expanded our space, our medical team, our services, and our vision for what dignity-centered, whole-person healthcare could look like in our community. In the fall of 2024, we opened the doors to the Connect Medical Clinic you know today.

Once our expanded clinic was fully operational, we turned our attention again to the assignment that had first been placed in my hands in 2018. With dedicated compliance support, interns, staff leadership, and countless hours spent digging deeply into AAAHC standards, we prepared for our mock accreditation survey.

And I am incredibly proud to tell you: we passed our Mock Survey with flying colors and by the time you are reading this, our official survey will have been completed on August 24 and 25.

AAAHC accreditation represents more than policies, binders, checklists, or a seal on the wall. It is an independent verification of our commitment to high-quality ambulatory healthcare and, to me, inseparable from our commitment to dignity. People deserve excellent care. They deserve to be listened to, respected, protected, and treated as whole human beings worthy of significant time and attention.

Because of your support, that is the kind of care people can now receive at Connect.

There is something deeply meaningful to me about this moment. A task placed before me when I first arrived at Connect eight years ago is finally nearing completion—not because the work was ever forgotten or abandoned, but because God was growing this mission along the way. There were new doors to walk through, new patients to serve, new providers to welcome, new spaces to build, and a much bigger vision taking shape.

You helped us grow from a small clinic navigating change into a comprehensive, dignity-centered medical clinic prepared to meet rigorous national standards of quality. You helped create a place where patients can receive both clinical excellence and deeply human care.

And as I look back at that bin of policy templates placed in my hands in 2018, I can only smile at how much bigger God’s plan was than anything I could have imagined then.

Thank you for being an essential part of this journey towards accreditation!

Tara Kelly Zettel
President/CEO
Connect Medical Clinic

P.S. Check out our social media or sign up for our weekly e-newsletter, The Connect 4, to be the first to hear the results of our AAAHC survey!