Community health
La Plata County Health Alliance takes shape
 

by Christine Rasmussen

The Durango community moved one step closer to improving access to health care with the formation of a countywide Health Alliance in November.

The formation of a regional health-care alliance was the top recommendation passed down from the Care Capacity Project, a year-long effort launched in April 2009 and funded by a Colorado Health Foundation grant to assess the state of health care in the community.

More than 167 business owners, government officials, health-care providers and representatives of schools and nonprofits were interviewed for the CHCCP report.

Health Alliance members, which met in mid-November to establish a common vision and goals, include: Kirk Dignum, CEO of Mercy Regional Medical Center; Brett Gosney, CEO of Animas Surgical Center; Pat Hartman, executive director of the Durango Network; Bern Heath, CEO of Axis Health System; Bob Juskevich, retired physician and liaison to the Citizens Health Advisory Council; Lezlie Mayer, director of La Plata County Human Services; Keith Owen, superintendent of Durango School District 9-R; and Leon Vinci, director of public health for the San Juan Basin Health Department.

“These are people who deal with each other but haven’t really sat down and talked to each other,” said Bob Juskevich, chosen as co-chair, along with Leon Vinci. Juskevich said the point of the meeting was to see if people are willing to work together, decide on some specific goals and actions, and meet on a monthly basis.

There were about 10 goals enumerated at the first meeting, and the group decided to focus on three at a time. The first goal is to increase electronic communication of community health records. “If I go to the health department and have something done and then I go to Albuquerque, the people in Albuquerque can’t access these records,” explained Juskevich. As such, one of the first steps of the Alliance will be to pick an information-sharing system and get area health-care providers on board.

“Everyone puts their information into this cloud, and then people have access to certain parts of your admission, depending on who they are and what they can do,” Juskevich said of the envisioned system. “This way, all systems will be able to interface with the Internet and get stuff back, so that’s one record for you everywhere.”

The second goal is to “increase understanding of appropriate places, increase medical access for the underserved, and to increase the number of providers who accept Medicaid.” Currently, there is no central location to get approved for treatment under Medicaid. “If you are approved for Medicaid at one office and go

Furthermore, if a federally qualified health center (FQHC) is established here and acts as a supplier for Medicaid, there will be increased funding for Medicare and Medicaid through that clinic, he said.

Part of increasing access for patients is to eliminate barriers, such as restricted care based on income. Another access issue centers around referrals from one doctor’s office to another. “How do you get there? Does he/she make an appointment for you?” asked Juskevich. Overall, the system has a tendency to be disjointed, especially when it comes to mental health, he continued.

The third goal, “to increase the group understanding of federal, state, insurance companies’ and their own organizations’ rules/limits/risks and how those affect the group as it moves toward an integrated system,” will focus on the need for internal organization for the Health Alliance. “We are representing a lot of different agencies,” said Vinci. “We certainly know what the title (of the agency) means, but we really don’t know what the agency does. For us to be an effective organization, we need to know what each one of our parts is, so we can work better together.”

There will be a need for an external learning process as well because so much is going on with national health reform, according to Vinci. “We have to know what the impacts to La Plata County are going to be and how it will affect our individual agencies and what we’re trying to do as a group. The buzzwords are ‘better communication, avoiding duplication, more efficient’ – all for the benefit of the consumer.”

The other goals the Alliance will work toward include: the creation of a nonprofit medical-access voucher program; a formalized, donated medical-care program; the negotiation of lower-fee services with providers; sustaining the School Based Health Center at Durango High School; promoting disease prevention in schools; decreasing duplication of efforts/services; and seeing health gaps disappear.

“These are huge issues that take a lot of strategy and development,” said Vinci. “And even if you get everybody behind it, how do you move to the next place – do you find a grant, financial resources?”

Juskevich stressed that the Health Alliance is not meant to be an exclusive group. “The idea is to have the people around the table who can make decisions. If we find it necessary to have input from other groups, then those people will be involved,” he said. “Those of us involved are excited to be doing this. There is a real sense of working together to move in a certain direction.” •