Kudos for the Other Rochester

Mention Rochester in the context of leadership in health care, and I’ll wager most people think of the Mayo Clinic. Rochester MN absolutely merits recognition as home of this world-class health system for more than 100 years. However, Rochester NY deserves just as much attention for its ongoing successes in community-based, future-focused health planning.

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of sharing the podium there with Dr. Janet Corrigan (CEO of the National Quality Forum) at a conference organized by the Healthcare Benefits Network, attended by leaders from a broad array of organizations with stakes in improved well-being of the population. Local guest speakers who followed our keynotes gave impressive overviews of data-sharing, care coordination, public health programs, wellness activities, and other collaborations to promote top-quality medical services and make them available as inexpensively as possible. The community’s new program for reducing unnecessary care was particularly impressive.

My usual role is to tell audiences that they had better start collaborating to do these things right away, but last Friday I found myself validating good work that has already been done. I was particularly impressed to see that vertical (multi-stakeholder) community partnerships, not just horizontal collaborations among providers, are the well-established norm there. Rochester MN is the place to look for a benchmark delivery system that has withstood the tests of time, but Rochester NY is the place to see how an entire community—not just its providers—can coordinate activities and resources to build a rational health system in response to today’s challenges.

Rochester NY isn’t waiting to see what Washington DC will allow as the latest health reform laws unfold (more likely, in my opinion, unravel) between now and 2018. Rather, Rochester’s leaders are defining what the local population needs for the foreseeable future and restructuring relationships as necessary to produce desired changes for the good of the community. If my comments added anything new for the local leadership’s consideration, it was a challenge to develop systematic methods for retaining and reallocating the resources saved as costs are lowered and unnecessary services are eliminated. Today’s dysfunctional system does not reward providers for becoming efficient, so they need to develop prior agreements that redirect savings to other planned improvements in community health.

After attending quite a few recent conferences exploring how to prepare for government-mandated health reform, I was inspired to find community leaders instead discussing how to meet local needs for health care in spite of ARRA and the Affordable Care Act. Can any community afford to put progress on hold while seeing what happens in Washington? If you agree with me that change cannot wait, I suggest you explore what’s happening in Rochester NY. Whether you agree or disagree, please contribute a reply to the Healthy Debate.