Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health and CEO of UCLA Hospital System, discusses the system's outpatient services expansion and strategic vision in 2017.
"Over the past year at UCLA Health, we've been focusing in on continued expansion of our primary and secondary care network. Our goal is to place UCLA healthcare conveniently throughout the greater Los Angeles area to provide high quality, cost-effective care. In some areas, we have been adding select specialty care to clinics with the same mindset. Our goal is to provide care in the most efficient setting. Our hospitals are focused on the more complex inpatient tertiary and quaternary care our patients need.
Because Los Angeles is a large metropolitan area with issues like heavy traffic, it's important for us to go where the patients are. As part of that strategy, we operate about 160 clinics in about 70 different locations throughout Los Angeles that include primary care, urgent care and select specialty care as well. Since 2010, UCLA Health has opened or will soon open outpatient facilities in about 50 new locations throughout the Los Angeles region.
The clinics are a combination of properties we own and lease. We staff them with UCLA physicians and staff, as we've found our draw from the patients is the UCLA brand. We also have select partnerships with community hospitals near our clinic locations that can provide a secondary level of care. The community hospitals are staffed with UCLA hospitalists to provide that care.
In some areas, we have outpatient surgery and procedure centers as well. Some of these centers we own and operate ourselves and a few are joint ventures. We see these centers becoming a bigger part of our outpatient strategy in the future because patients like the convenience and it helps us reduce the total costs of care while demonstrating a value-added service.
Right now, we are concerned about what will happen with the ACA. In California, the ACA expansion provides coverage to 4 million people and we're looking at how new health policies will impact our strategic plan going forward."
View the full article titled "8 hospital executives share outpatient strategy — ASCs, retail clinics, key partnerships & more"