Health - Flavor

Collaboration key in advancing health care

– Dean Davis, INHS photos.

For years, health-care organizations, universities, and professional groups have worked together to make the Spokane area a hub for care, higher learning, and innovation.

Rich Hadley, president of Greater Spokane Incorporated, calls the collaboration effort between people in the medical community and others exceptional.

"There's a whole menu of things that are being worked on," says Hadley. "We've got work groups in academic planning and biomedical research and academic development."

Increasing connectivity

Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS) is a Spokane-based nonprofit organization that helps reduce health-care costs by facilitating the sharing of resources, including information technology and educational outreach. In 1994, executives from Spokane's major hospitals—Deaconess Hospital, Valley Hospital & Medical Center, Providence Holy Family Hospital, and Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children's Hospital—banded together to merge competing business lines and form INHS to oversee them. INHS manages Northwest MedStar, a critical care transport service, and St. Luke's Rehabilitation Institute. Using technology, the organization has built a network of hospitals, many of which are in rural communities in Washington and Idaho, that allows them to share and transfer health information electronically.

Better diabetes care

In May 2010, the Spokane region was selected as one of 17 Beacon Communities in the U.S. to participate in a pilot program to address reducing costs and improving health outcomes for type 2 diabetes patients.

The program utilizes information technology and best-practices principles to coordinate patient care at a regional level across a variety of medical settings in Eastern Washington and North Idaho, from physician offices to hospitals to laboratories. The goal is to improve continuity of care for patients with type 2 diabetes, a growing concern, and reduce emergency room visits.

Planned new clinic

Washington State University has received a grant from Spokane County to plan a multidisciplinary health clinic for people with little or no insurance on or near Spokane's Riverpoint Campus.

The clinic would be a partnership between the medical community and the health sciences programs of WSU, Eastern Washington University, and the University of Washington. The clinic would also give students and faculty hands-on clinical experience in a variety of medical professions.

Growing medical education

Thanks to the concerted efforts of GSI, area colleges, and the business and medical communities, Washington's legislature granted $35 million in capital funding for WSU's new Biomedical and Health Sciences Building, which broke ground at the Riverpoint Campus in fall 2011.

The $78 million building is expected to accommodate all four years of medical education and WSU's College of Pharmacy.

"A medical school is something that people understand so the community has uniformly supported this project—business, local government, the education community, and residents because they understand health care," Hadley says.

While a modest number of medical students attend classes in Spokane through the University of Washington School of Medicine's WWAMI program, adding a building is a major step toward offering a full four-year program here, and subsequently growing enrollment.

"A building is worth a thousand words," Hadley says.

In addition to growing the number of medical students in Spokane, there is an effort to increase infrastructure in the University District, of which the Riverpoint Campus is a part, as well as coordinating efforts with the area's colleges.

"The feedback we get in Olympia from legislators in other areas is that they're amazed at how organized we are and how we work together and advocate," he says. "We are regional, unified, and focused."