Providence St. Joseph Health

In a NEJM Catalyst piece, Amy Compton-Phillips, M.D., executive vice president and chief clinical officer for Providence St. Joseph Health, the big western U.S. hospital chain, discusses how to “decouple care from geography {especially in the vast and sparsely settled sections of the mountain West} so that we can break that constraint. To do this, we have to have a different business model than today. We can’t just be a hospital system.” Instead, she says, Providence is building business verticals, such as for the physician enterprise, ambulatory care and home and community services.

NEJM says:

“Providence is working on retrieving data to create a sustainable business model for this digital health care; with headquarters in Seattle, Amazon.com and Microsoft are down the street, meaning there are a lot of data scientists in the area. Providence is leveraging these data scientists to embed AI, machine learning, and data science, and in terms of capacity is investing in tools that decouple care from geography, including a variety of apps.”

“The health system’s telemedicine network includes, for example, a Telestroke program in 100 hospitals. With telemedicine, Providence has been able to work around the conundrums that come with regulatory differences in different states. In addition to access to care, they’ve also developed online health professions education at the University of Providence, providing long-distance learning and simulation and matching up resources to where they’re needed so that students can stay in their rural communities rather having to move to a city,” NEJM reports.

To read and hear the full article, please hit this link.