Gunnison Valley Health report from Phelps

Dear Community Members:
It is an extreme privilege for me to share important initiatives at Gunnison Valley Health in 2011. We’re in for an exciting year.

2010 Facility Improvement Project
This coming spring we will open the new Hospital addition and I can hardly wait until the day that we can invite you in to look at what we have created for you and your family. You will find new spaces for diagnostic imaging, laboratory services, surgery waiting, and patient registration. The imaging center will feature new M.R.I., C.T. and Fluoroscopy equipment that will improve many aspects of the quality of the services we provide. In addition, the digital mammography technology that was acquired in October, with financial assistance from Tough Enough to Wear Pink, will have a new permanent home in our Women’s Imaging Center. The new laboratory will feature improvements designed to accommodate you in a more personal environment and our new surgery waiting area will be more comfortable for patient families.
Once the new building is completed we expect to begin work on the creation of remodeled space for the care and treatment of our cancer patients with the development of a new Oncology Center. Further, we are going to use our vacated space to greatly improve our clinic facilities for the increasing number of visiting specialists.

Assisted Living and Senior Care Center
Also on the agenda for 2011 is determining how Gunnison Valley Health can effectively address the growing needs of our senior citizens at Assisted Living and the Senior Care Center (SCC). The SCC, formerly known as the Health Care Center, is over 30 years old and needs modernizing if we are to provide the very best possible care for our residents. We have designed a beautiful plan for upgrading these services and we want to engage the community in conversations to determine how best to fund the renovation and construction to make it possible.

Health Care Reform Legislation
We are closely monitoring the many developments associated with the Health Care Reform Legislation passed in 2010. It isn’t clear to anyone what pieces of the 1,000 page law will be implemented, ruled constitutional or reversed by new legislation. It is probable that the pre-existing condition mandates and the extension of age for including children in their family’s plan until age 26 will stay, which will help reduce the staggering number of uninsured Americans and increase cost at the same time. A key focus of the new legislation is improved quality through such things as the mandatory use of electronic medical records which gives providers the ability to share patient health information across cyberspace to other providers. The expense and work effort for every physician and hospital in the country to meet the mandates is enormous. However, there is no doubt that, when successfully implemented, this sharing of information will reduce cost from duplication of services and improve care for every individual. We are very excited to begin the journey to enhance the coordination of the care of each individual patient because of the tremendous promise that the seamless communication of vital health information has for positively improving cost, safety and quality of your healthcare.
We are monitoring the movement around Health Reform legislation closely. No matter what happens, there will be more patients using the system and there will not be more money to pay for this care. It is my estimation that GVH will experience a 20% volume increase, but will collect an amount well short of the cost to cover the care associated with this growth.

Looking to the Future
Of paramount importance is our continued commitment to implement proven practices that reduce the frequency of medical mistakes that injure patients. One example is requiring patients to wear a name band and requiring staff to ask each patient their name and birth date to confirm a positive match before any procedure is performed. This is only one of a dozen practices that we have already adopted and during 2011 we will continue to work every day toward our goal of becoming 100 percent error free. While not every event causes serious injury, our goal is to reduce the frequency of serious patient safety events by an additional 20 percent in 2011 to a total of only three events.
In 2011 we pledge continued focus on safety and continued recruitment of new physicians to our community to practice on a part-time or full-time basis because we know you have a strong desire to receive health services here at home.
We will continue to encourage you to take advantage of the online Personal Wellness Profile, designed to assist you and your primary care doctor in benchmarking and tracking improvements to your health. And we pledge to provide a “health profile” of the entire community and will work with our partners to prepare action plans to help all of us in Gunnison County Live Well Together.

All the best in 2011,
Randy Phelps,
Chief Executive Officer