The Affordable Care Act has been described in many terms since its 2010 implementation, but the most accurate is transformative.
The effects of the ACA on hospitals was the topic of discussion at an April 12 panel at the Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting, April 11 to April 14 in Chicago. Jose Sanchez, president and CEO of Chicago-based Norwegian American Hospital and Robert Garrett, Co-CEO of Hackensack (N.J.) Meridian Health, spoke at length about how the ACA and the post-ACA landscape transformed their facilities and drove them into their communities.
Here are four of their most telling thoughts.
Editor's note: Quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
1. Robert Garrett: What the ACA did most for our organization is really focus us on value. It also changed our mission. We changed our mission to be more than a healthcare organization, to become a health organization where we are concerned and focused on prevention of disease and keeping our populations health[y] and well.
2. Mr. Garrett: The ACA certainly drove us toward getting bigger because we needed to scale, but also it drove us toward these strategic partnerships to improve on how care was delivered and to really deliver on the promise for value. The other piece I would say is it really focused our attention on developing a robust ambulatory care network. We recognized, under the ACA, that more and more care would be driven to alternative settings.
3. Jose Sanchez: Certainly in a poor community like Humboldt Park, we embraced the ACA with great enthusiasm. It helped to expand coverage to a number of individuals that otherwise wouldn't have been able to get it. However, the concerns we [had] was that it would never be a perfect piece of legislation because in our community we see a significant number of individuals that are undocumented. They pour into our emergency department and those individuals will never be able to get any coverage. In our community, we continue to embark [on] an aggressive effort to get as many people covered in the community. We were able to cover more than 6,000 people in the community through [our] efforts.
The ACA also helped us to focus and develop relationship[s] with other providers in the community. … Right now we are working [on] a partnership with five different agencies that are providing behavioral health and abuse services in the community. We've gone into the community to identify the gaps, what resources [our] partners have and what we have, and how they can complement each other.
4. Mr. Sanchez: The ACA really helped us to embark on a very aggressive quality journey. When we look at [our] metrics, we outperform the national standards in mortality rate and safety metrics. The ACA has forced us to be more focused on patient satisfaction and also looking for opportunities to review and identify those areas we do well, and for those areas that are not profitable, we try to find a way to improve it.