Intermountain Healthcare was the cover story of The New York Times Magazine published Sunday, November 8, 2009. The article focuses on Intermountain's efforts to continually improve clinical quality, and it highlights the work of Brent James, MD, MStat, Intermountain's chief quality officer and executive director of the Intermountain Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research. The magazine has a national circulation of more than 1.4 million readers.
Read the full article online at: The New York Times Magazine: 'Making Health Care Better'
Why is Intermountain the focus of this week's The New York Times Magazine?
Because, according to reporter David Leonhardt, our name kept coming up in visits with experts across the country and even internationally. He gives examples like these:
Jack Wennberg, MD, a researcher at Dartmouth, told him: "It's the best model in the country of how you can actually change health care."
Leonhardt shares the opinion of Anthony Staines, PhD, a health scholar and hospital regulator in Switzerland who studies the world's most admired hospitals. Staines noted that "Intermountain was really the only system where there was evidence of improvement in a majority of departments."
And finally, John Mendelsohn, MD, the president of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who is offering an in-house version of Dr. James's quality course, said: "Everybody is trying to systemically improve value and quality. But at Intermountain they have worked out the operational system and the culture to do it."
The article (published Sunday, Nov. 8) tells the engaging story of Dr. James's early life, his love of mathematics and the scientific method, and how it all led him to the work he is doing now. It shares the results we've achieved in our Clinical Programs and describes the collaboration with physicians that has been the catalyst in our search for evidence-based "best practices." It takes note of both what we've accomplished at Intermountain and where we hope to go—which Dr. James sums up by saying: "We're still not as good as we're going to be."
The article also shares the concerns of physicians and the point of view of skeptics who worry about substituting protocols for intuition. It puts everything in the context of our culture in Utah and at Intermountain-and finally, in the context of healthcare reform proposals in Washington.
Here's how The New York Times alerted readers to a story about healthcare reform and Intermountain last week:
"In The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, economics columnist David Leonhardt poses one of the more disturbing questions of the health care debate: If politicians cannot fix America's fragmented, ailing health care system, who will? Physicians have reshaped medicine in the past, Mr. Leonhardt argues, and a few—like Dr. Brent James, chief quality officer of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City—already are leading the way to the future."