As the State Office of Rural Health, our Annual Conference serves as Colorado’s premier rural healthcare meeting of the year. Every year we challenge ourselves to top the previous year’s conference, understanding how important this meeting is for our members and everyone who cares about the health of rural Coloradans. This year, I feel we achieved our goal at our conference in Breckenridge July 1-2. Conference evaluations were very generous in expressing appreciation for the incredible networking opportunities, and high caliber speakers. Thank you to our elite sponsor, The Colorado Health Foundation, premier sponsor, HealthONE, and our classic sponsors, Centura Health, Colorado Hospital Association, COPIC Companies, and The Colorado Trust without whose support the event would have been impossible!
Keynote speaker Brian Lee, founder of Custom Learning Systems, did an excellent job of getting everyone focused on proactively tackling healthcare reform and making it a positive for patients and providers . The work we do is difficult and often frustrating, and it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of being cynical about the challenges we’re presented with from the legislative arena. Brian showed us that the right attitude and a focus on the goal of providing excellent patient care makes anything possible.
Joan Henneberry, Director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Finance, continued the theme. (This is all the more impressive if you understand even a tiny portion of the challenges that this leader confronts at work each day!) Joan discussed how federal healthcare reform legislation has already benefitted us significantly in our work, and how 2014 – admittedly still a good bit down the road – will allow us to add 130,000 more Coloradans to Medicaid and Child Health Plan Plus (CHP+) enrollment.
Brock Slabach, senior vice-president with the National Rural Health Association, urged us to push the envelope on the Health Information Technology (HIT) front. “Those who have deployed HIT systems beyond Meaningful Use and leveraged these systems to control costs and improve quality demonstrably will survive the coming storm,” Brock predicted. Despite the technological and financial challenges contained in his challenge, I saw a lot of heads nodding around the room when Brock made this point. What’s truly important is never easy.
Thank you to all the wonderful speakers and conference attendees, especially those in rural Colorado who traveled long distances to join us for our Annual Conference. Thank you also to my staff for exceeding my expectations for this meeting. I left the mountains more energized and ready to do our part to take on healthcare reform together and achieve the mission of providing rural Coloradans with access to high quality healthcare services. If you were there with me, I hope it was a good meeting for you too.
Sincerely,
Lou Ann Wilroy
CEO, Colorado Rural Health Center
