HJAR Sep/Oct 2019

DIALOGUE 16 SEP / OCT 2019 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   am fortunate to be able to work with these wonderful folks as they take great care of our friends and neighbors. Editor How does Northwest Health, with your leadership, balance costs and quality? Park Achieving the right balance is the most significant challenge for every health care leader. We must have an uncompromised focus on quality. When payers decide to pay us less for delivering care—which seems to happen more and more—we have to get more creative. We have to be passionate about taking care of our clinical or bed- side resources. At the end of the day, we are not going to compromise quality for cost, so we have to focus on our operations to make sure we are giving our patients every- thing they need without consuming unnec- essary resources in the process. We try to leverage technology advancements to make our teams as effective as possible, while still providing the personal touch we all expect when we are sick or hurt. Examples of this include our bedside shift reporting, our hourly rounding, and our patient safety huddles. We use national and local data ele- ments and best practices to drive the high quality care and focused communication to our patients. This allows our clinical staff the tools and resources to provide exceptional care through effective communication and in a safer manner. Editor What is the future of Northwest Health? Park We are pleased to be able to be work- ing with the Northwest Arkansas Council to help improve the region’s health care econ- omy. The organization recently released a report estimating that Northwest Arkan- sas is missing out on $950 million a year in our health care economy. There were four recommendations for how the region can attract and retain health care profession- als and patients: establish a division of the council focused on health care transfor- mation; expand graduate medical educa- tion; develop an interdisciplinary research institute; and develop a medical school. It is predicted that if these recommenda- tions are implemented, the region could have a surplus of $57 million in the health care economy by 2040. Along with the rest of the health care community here, we are very excited about the possibilities ahead for Northwest Arkansas. At Northwest Health, we are passionate about expanding the services for strokes, cardiovascular issues, trauma care, surgical services and obesity. We are also working Denten Park (center), Market CEO of Northwest Health, thanks U.S. Senator John Boozman for the work he is doing to help fund more physician residency programs. Senator Boozman helped introduce a bipartisan bill designed to address the shortage of more than 120,000 primary care and specialty physicians the nation is expected to face by 2030. The Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act seeks to gradually lift the caps on Medicare-supported doctor training slots by 3,000 per year over five years creating 15,000 new residency training slots across the country. With them is Nelson Peacock, President and CEO of the Northwest Arkansas Coucil.