I recently read the thousands of comments shared by you, our employee family, on our annual employee engagement survey. Thank you so much for taking time to share your thoughts and ideas. I always enjoy reading through every single comment. From the fun comments to the areas we could be doing better, I love hearing directly from you in your own words.
Our team is working hard to address several areas you helped identify, but one particular area was shared several times, and I wanted to be sure you had answers for this right away. Many of you asked about why we’re purchasing parcels of land in the community. It was asked in different ways, but it was clear you’d like to know the reason we’re investing so much in property.
Those of you who attended Town Halls (which happened after the survey) heard the strategy behind the recent purchases. In fact, we went into great detail sharing the reason the network is investing so heavily in the communities we serve. One reason is that leaders in surrounding cities are reaching out to us because they want a Kettering presence in their communities. They know that Kettering stands for world-class quality coupled with a faith-based mission to meet the needs of their communities.
Another reason is due to the federal government’s rapid changes in the way we’re reimbursed for care. In fact, the government recently started several new programs including MACRA, MIPS, APMs, CPC+, and more. Although the acronyms can be confusing, there’s one major goal with these new programs: keep as many people out of the hospital as possible.
The government is going to keep patients our of the hospital by empowering primary care physicians to do more to control the care of patients in their offices. While this is a good thing, we want to be sure we’re well prepared for this major change. One way to keep up with this shift is to make sure we don’t lose any patient volume in our hospitals by backfilling it with new patients. The best way we’ve found to backfill is to build new access points in surrounding communities. This allows patient care to be provided in their local regions while giving hem access to our tertiary level of care should they need it. Our goal at Kettering is to utilize these new centers to create a larger pipeline of total patients coming into the hospital so the new government programs don’t have such a huge impact on us.
These new access points have been very effective. From the emergency centers in Franklin, Preble, and Huber Heights to the recent announcements of more access points in Middletown and Troy, these centers allow us to directly address the recent changes in the federal government’s reimbursement models while meeting the needs of the local communities.
As Always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if I can ever answer any questions you have. Feel free to email me directly or use the “Ask the President” feature on our intranet site.
Thanks so much for all you do to meet the needs of our patients and families!
Jarrod