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“We’d like to ask whoever ends up {next year} in the White House to create a position that has the ability to do pilot projects that connect healthcare with other governmental agencies. Oftentimes in healthcare, we providers are the recipient of somebody who presents with their health deteriorated, not because of healthcare, but because they lack housing, lack food, employment, and so on. We believe there’s an opportunity for us to move upstream in terms of caring for people’s health if we can collaborate and have a panel of folks from different governmental agencies (to sit down) with the private providers and begin looking at what are the causes of ill health. We know what the determinants are, and they’re not always part of the healthcare industry.
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“We are moving in that direction {more toward outpatient, ambulatory care} because we’re looking at the life cycle of the people we’re privileged to serve. Fifty percent of our revenue at Ascension comes from other than inpatient care. And so we continue to look at those ambulatory sites and those different sites of care because we believe that there are better sites, lower-cost sites, where people should be able to have care. That means we need to have partnerships. And some of the laws prevent us from having partnerships, either with the physicians or with other competitors in the marketplace. Those are the kinds of things that we want to look at to see how we can, in fact, raise quality and lower cost.”
