Area health care leaders invited to help redesign system; live chat Thursday

Area health care leaders will travel to Washington, D.C., next week to lead efforts in redesigning health care.

Ted Townsend, CEO of St. Luke's Hospital; Tim Charles, CEO of Mercy Medical Center, and Jim Levett, chief medical officer for Physicians' Clinic of Iowa, are among the group invited to attend the meeting May 26-27 by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Teams from 15 sites were invited to participate.

Cedar Rapids was one of just 10 communities cited in a health care cost report last year by the institute's CEO, Donald Berwick.

Berwick said if the United States performed the same as those areas, “we wouldn't have a health care crisis.”

“The data is pretty clear,” Townsend said. “Our costs are well below other parts of the country.”

He attributed the feat, in part, to a balance between cooperation and competition with the two Cedar Rapids hospitals.

One element of cooperation is specialists who practice at both hospitals.

Townsend did not know what other communities would attend this month's session, called “How Will We Do that? Building Low Cost, High Quality Health Care Regions in America.”

He said the aim is to share ideas on redesigning health care to provide better care at lower cost.

Best practices, new ideas and barriers that communities encounter will be discussed.

“I think we are doing great things,” Townsend said. “But health care still costs too much.”

Containing those costs is one of the challenges facing every community, he said.

Townsend noted that Cedar Rapids applied for, but was not awarded a $20 million federal grant to develop a pilot health care information exchange.

Leaders were informed last week that the city did not receive the Beacon Community grant, which would have established a network to share information among health care providers.

Townsend said they might reapply.

Mercy Medical Center CEO Tim Charles will answer questions about health care initiatives in Cedar Rapids and the trip to Washington during a live chat at noon Thursday right here at GazetteOnline.