By now, many of you are familiar with the announcement about Community Medical Centers (CMC) collaboration with Adventist Health (AH) to care for underserved patients, eventually covering a four county region. It is combining the strengths of AH clinic network and CMC's specialized/critical care to improve access to higher-level care for managed MediCal patients in rural and local areas, and brings primary care closer to where patients live in Fresno, Kings, Madera, and Tulare counties.

It was shared that this partnership is "...to deliver more comprehensive, efficient, and high-quality healthcare to a population in need". Within the next two years, it's estimated the new plan could deliver coordinated, clinically integrated care to as many as 200,000 people...

...that's where the "hearts, hands, and heads" come in. As you can imagine, this initiative will not just happen and will require lots of cooperation, coordination, engagement, support, and essentially a whole new mind-set about how we deliver care. We will no longer be a "Hospital Delivery System", but will need to become a "Population Management Services Organization", and kinda fast. Two years seems a ways off, but as they say in "doggy years", it's gonna come at us pretty quick. We're going to do years worth of work in a condensed time period...and commendably, so much has already been done! Staff and physicians throughout the organization have been participating in numerous work groups to implement very successful initiatives moving the metrics in the right direction, some are in the works, and much more is ahead.

That means lots of involvement throughout the organization and alongside our affiliated medical staff. And you know the part about "efficient"? Well, that in essence means "for less". This announcement has accelerated our need to redesign how we deliver care, but it's not just for this specific action, but for everything we do. It will require functioning as a true system, and not as individual hospitals and clinics.

Our ads tout "One Network, One Community"...folks, it will ring true now, and for a long time to come.