Earlier this week, Pete Delgado, President and CEO of Salinas Valley Memorial Health System (SVMH), and Dr. Steve Packer, President and CEO of Montage Health, shared their success with almost a hundred senior healthcare executives at the annual American College of Healthcare Executives Congress.
Sharing best practices helps everyone, particularly when healthcare systems and the communities they serve have been stressed by first the pandemic and now the great resignation.
SVMH and Montage Health embraced co-opetition for Monterey County, CA, resulting in objective improvements for approximately 350,000 diverse folks across the socio-economic spectrum. Co-opetition is defined as cooperating when synergy will help the participants while competing when limited resources exist. Working together by implementing a comprehensive proven program focused on people, places, and policy resulted in significant improvements after two years, as shown in the charts below:
Downward trends across the rest of the nation during the pandemic were reversed in Monterey:
These changes extend over the entire community—not just the already healthy neighborhoods. Monterey County’s social determinants of health score now exceeds the nation but lags slightly behind the state of California. Still, although residents in this county worry less about money than in other regions, not having enough money to do what they want remains a problem.
The following subjects resonated during a discussion with the engaged audience:
Sharing a great story is always a pleasure; helping other communities embrace well-being and health helps everyone. A question remains: why don’t more embrace prevention?