Utah

The Utah Department of Health issued a primary care spending report using the state’s All Payer Claims Database (APCD). The report uses the Maine Quality Forum’s definition of primary care to calculate the total amount of spending on primary health care services as a percentage of all healthcare expenditures. It found that primary care made up a combined 6.4% (narrow definition) and 8.5% (broad definition) of total expenditures in 2019.

Grand Valley and Western Colorado patients who go through blood and marrow transplant procedures at the Huntsman Cancer Institute can now have some of their follow-up appointments locally after they return home.

Salt Lake City's Huntsman Cancer Institute and Grand Junction's Community Hospital recently teamed up to open a telemedicine clinic to serve Mesa County patients.

The future of U.S. health care reform is muddier now than at any point in the past two decades. Health care was one of the most important issues for voters in the 2018 election, but there is little reason to believe that substantive national action is likely any time soon. The Trump administration is taking aggressive steps to undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA) but is limited in what it can do on health policy absent legislation from Congress. States are poised to fill this vacuum.

It wasn’t medical knowledge or clinical acumen that ultimately helped Catherine M. White, M.D., FAAP, impact the life of a patient with special needs. It was her team’s commitment to building a relationship with the child’s mother, so they could determine why the family was missing the specialist appointments critical to the child’s care.

WASHINGTON — The budget deal in Congress is billed as a measure to grant stability to a government funding process that has lurched from crisis to crisis — but it is also stuffed with provisions that will broadly affect the nation’s health care system, like repealing an advisory board to curb Medicare spending and funding community health centers.

There’s a point at which gaps in health care can become gaping holes for parents of children with specialized medical needs.

Health care providers are under tremendous pressure to achieve the Triple Aim of better health for designated populations, better care experiences for patients and reduced cost of care. It comes at a time of enormous transition in health care, in which successful models are hard to find and refine. That's what's so encouraging about the model of personalized primary care that we have been developing at Intermountain Healthcare. The lessons we've already learned are informing our expanding rollout of the model and enhancing the potential for broader scaling.

Facing the fact that just 5 percent of the patient population was responsible for nearly half of its spending, one health organization has tried some fairly radical changes.

In Utah, Intermountain Healthcare decided to address the problem with primary care in an attempt to keep these most vulnerable patients from falling through the cracks.