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Healthcare Happenings: NUMC focusing on improving health care

Healthcare Happenings

Greetings from the team at the New Ulm Medical Center. As the national debate on health reform continues, we are staying focused on serving you well regardless of the legislative outcome. Our strategies are intended to improve access to health care services, improve the quality of the care experience, improve affordability, and lastly, improve the overall health of those we serve.

As many rural hospitals are struggling to survive the challenges and pace of change in healthcare, New Ulm Medical Center stands out as a national leader in performance because of the talented and dedicated team of providers and caregivers (660 employees and physicians). It is gratifying to see the commitment of our team recognized at a local and national level, from the Chamber Business of the Year to being the only Minnesota hospital recognized by HealthGrades for both patient safety and patient experience to once again being rated in the top 1 percent of all national rural hospitals for performance and value.

Specific to improving access we are pleased to share we recently added two new family medicine physicians, Dr. Andy Dickinson and Dr. Jared Colvert, emergency department physician Dr. Jessica Greupner, and many new physical therapists with the Courage Kenny Rehab Institute. In addition, we partnered with the Minnesota Lung Center to begin pulmonology services from Dr. Jonathan Hovda. We also have expanded access through new telehealth video services that connect our patients to specialty experts without having to spend time and money traveling long distances for a short appointment. This past week our innovative TeleHeart program with the Minneapolis Heart Institute was published in a national research journal. Collectively, over 50 New Ulm providers will be seeing more than 120,000 patient visits in 2017.

As we look forward to 2018, we already have five full-time physicians that will join our clinic to improve access in the following specialties — neurology, endocrin- ology, orthopedics, podiatry and family medicine.

Early this year our clinical team set a goal to improve performance on 11 different quality measures that we thought would help our patients through prevention efforts (such as cancer screenings) and better management of existing chronic illnesses (such as diabetes, asthma, depression). Key to success is a true partnership between our patients, providers and the broader health care team. While we have more work to do, collectively as a community we can celebrate that as of October we have made improvements on all 11 measures. As we improve we are able to prevent more late-stage cancer, prevent avoidable addiction to opioid medication, and prevent complications like hospitalizations from diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

Access to more affordable health care and insurance is very important to you. One key contributor to high health care costs is the over utilization of the emergency room. Across the nation, most ER’s are still seeing large increases in visits, however in New Ulm our visits have gone down over the past few years because we focused on improving access with more than 25 primary care providers and a walk-in clinic urgent care open seven days a week with a projected 15,000 visits in 2017. We want to make sure our communities have access to lower cost options when the care concern is not an emergency. Another important aspect of improving afford- ability is extending more options for health insurance coverage. In the next two years Allina Health and Aetna will be offering a new health insurance option to our business and senior community, which is intended to lower cost and improve the insurance experience.

I’m excited to continue our important work of providing access to excellent health care services for the region. On behalf of NUMC thank you for the trust you place in our team, it is a great privilege and responsibility for each of us.

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