Intermountain Trustee an EMAIL BRIEFING for INTERMOUNTAIN HEALTHCARE TRUSTEES
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Intermountain Trustee AN EMAIL BRIEFING FOR INTERMOUNTAIN HEALTHCARE TRUSTEES April 2017 INTERMOUNTAIN ISSUES AND INITIATIVES CEO Shares Overview of Intermountain’s Contributions in First Report to Community Intermountain wants Utah to be healthiest state with most affordable care Intermountain Healthcare CEO Marc Harrison, MD, had three takeaway messages about Intermountain’s commitments in a report to the community he delivered April 4: 1. We want Utah to be the healthiest state with the most affordable care. 2. We have an intense focus on the individual lives we touch. 3. We’re well-positioned to improve healthcare worldwide. Dr. Harrison shared his report with an audience of close to 1,000 caregivers, community partners, and government and business leaders who met live at Intermountain Medical Center and digitally at viewing locations in many Intermountain facilities. Here’s a summary of what Dr. Harrison discussed: • Intermountain has a significant economic impact on Utah. There’s a really strong correlation between the economy and healthcare,” Dr. Harrison said. Utah has the best state economy in the U.S., and Harrison said the relatively low cost of healthcare here is an important factor in that success. The annual Medicare spending per beneficiary in Utah is among the lowest in the nation with close to the highest quality. Intermountain is accountable for 6.6 percent of Utah’s economy and 4.8 percent of the state’s tax revenue ($436.3 million). • Our 39,000 caregivers make Intermountain Utah’s largest private employer. “One of my deepest beliefs is that we are all caregivers,” Dr. Harrison said. We’ve been recognized as an outstanding place to work by many national organizations, including Gallup, Forbes, and Computerworld. • We’re financially stable. “We’re very fortunate to have great financial stability,” he said. We continue to be the highest-rated healthcare system in the nation in the bond market. • We work to enhance the environment. We’ve made great progress in improving the energy efficiency of our facilities, including reducing our water usage by 8.8 million gallons annually and saving 2.2 million kilowatt hours per year through new LED lighting. • We vigorously support education. Intermountain provided $35.9 million to educate health professionals in 2016 and $6.6 million in tuition reimbursement to our caregivers. We also helped train 2,762 nurses last year. In addition, we provided $700,000 in scholarship funding over two years to seven Utah schools of higher education to enhance diversity in nursing and other jobs. “This is very important to us as we seek to have a vibrant and diversified workforce,” Dr. Harrison said. • We’re meeting high-priority community health needs. Intermountain conducted a community health needs assessment of the communities served by our 22 hospitals, and identified four key prevention priorities: pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, and prescription opioid misuse. “Intermountain has put these needs at the center of our strategy,” Dr. Harrison said. “We have systemwide goals around each item, which by the way bring no revenue and in fact often are very costly.” • We collaborate with other community organizations. “Intermountain is big and we’re strong and we’re well-organized, but we neither can nor should do everything by ourselves,” Dr. Harrison said. We gave $13 million last year to 48 not-for-profit organizations to assist in the important work they’re doing. • We’re improving patient safety. Through our Zero Harm efforts we’ve been able to increase the number of reported safety events by 26 percent and reduce the number of serious safety events by 30 percent. More than 28,000 of our caregivers have been trained in error prevention methods, including 99 percent of our leaders, and the rest of our caregivers will be trained soon. “This is outstanding work, but it’s work that’s never finished,” Dr. Harrison said. • We’re a national quality leader. “About 30 years ago we learned that reduction of variability results in better outcomes and is often more affordable,” Dr. Harrison said. That led to the founding of our Clinical Programs, which use data to reduce variability by establishing best practices that are used throughout the enterprise. “I’m very proud of the innovation that’s come out of our Clinical Programs,” he said. Four examples: • The Cardiovascular Clinical Program has been able to reduce door-to-balloon time for STEMI heart attack patients in the Salt Lake Valley to less than 90 minutes 99.8 percent of the time. “No other hospital system in the U.S. has achieved this,” Harrison said. • The Neurosciences Clinical Program has reduced the average door-to-needle time for stroke patients at Intermountain Medical Center to just 35 minutes. TeleStroke services have helped bring the door-to-needle time for the rest of the system down to an average of 61 minutes and have extended advanced stroke care to rural areas. • The Behavioral Health Clinical Program has implemented a team-based care model that’s increased the rate of depression screening, improved outcomes, and reduced ED visits and hospital admissions. • The Women and Newborns Clinical Program has offered 390 TeleHealth neonatal consults since 2014 and prevented 54 patient transports. “We’re making sure only babies that need to leave their families and communities actually leave,” Dr. Harrison said. • We’re successfully focusing on improving the patient experience. Intermountain performs above the national average on our HCAHPS scores — and has done so since 2007. • We’re a national model of affordability. We’ve reduced our costs steadily each year, saving the community close to $1 billion last year. “That, by the way, would have been extra revenue for us, but we look at it as money our community didn’t have to pay for their healthcare,” Dr. Harrison said. Some of those savings came from the Supply Chain, which saved $667 million over the last 10 years. Continuous Improvement efforts by caregivers also reaped $7.8 million in validated savings last year. • We’re expanding access to care. We contributed $419.5 million in charity care last year to care for people in 249,000 cases who were unable to pay for the services they needed. We operate 52 community clinics, and we’ve had 41 major construction projects in the last five years that bring care closer to people. We’re also bringing care to the people through projects like TeleHealth, Connect Care, and a mobile clinic in rural Garfield and Piute counties. • We’re focused on disease prevention. “Let’s stamp out chronic disease before it starts,” Dr. Harrison challenges. Intermountain is committed to work farther and farther upstream—before patients get sick—to improve health and prevent illness. Things we’re doing include our LiVe Well program and removing sugary snacks and drinks from Intermountain facilities. “It felt wrong to me to provide people with foods that aren’t good for them,” Dr. Harrison said. “We view this as the same as selling cigarettes in our hospitals, and we would never do that.” • We’re active in clinical research. “We are a research organization and have about 1,500 studies, but we aren’t a university,” Dr. Harrison said. “Our research is focused primarily on improving care delivery.” We had 402 research studies published last year. • We’re leading healthcare innovation worldwide. “We really think the way we do things is gaining traction and we’re really happy to share it with others,” Dr. Harrison said. Intermountain currently ranks among the top five healthcare systems for innovation. The Kem Gardner Transformation Center currently under construction will allow us to share our methods with healthcare leaders from around the world. Dr. Harrison concluded his presentation by reading a letter from a man who recently received gall-bladder surgery at Sanpete Valley Hospital, and because he was out of work and didn’t have health insurance, he wasn’t asked to pay. The man wrote a note that said: “Thank you for how well I was treated by Intermountain medically and now financially.” Dr. Harrison said experiences like that demonstrate Intermountain’s impact not just on Utah, but on people’s individual lives. “In the end,” he said, “this is the most human endeavor of all.” Watch the entire 60-minute presentation here. Intermountain Receives 2017 Hearst Health Prize for Improving Mental Health Care $100,000 award recognizes Intermountain’s Mental Health Integration program Intermountain Healthcare is the winner of the 2017 Hearst Health Prize in recognition of our Mental Health Integration program—which embeds mental health screening and treatment within primary care and select specialty practices. The Hearst Health Prize is an annual $100,000 award given by Hearst Health and the Jefferson College of Population Health of Thomas Jefferson University in recognition of outstanding achievement in managing or improving health in the U.S. The announcement was made at the 17th annual Population Health Colloquium in Philadelphia on March 28. “The caregivers at Intermountain are grateful to receive this recognition and award,” says Marc Harrison, MD, Intermountain President and CEO. “It honors our commitment to our patients, their families, and the communities we serve. It honors our caregivers with whom our patients trust to provide the highest quality, effective, and affordable care.” The Hearst Health Prize applications were evaluated by a panel of judges based on the program’s population health impact or outcome, demonstrated by measurable improvement; use of evidence-based interventions and best practices to improve the quality of care; promotion of communication, collaboration and engagement; scalability and sustainability; and innovation. Intermountain was selected as the winner out of an impressive list of finalists from across the country.