Intermountain Press Release

Salt Lake City —If the CEO of the Mayo Clinic were ever diagnosed with diabetes, where would he wish to be treated? At Intermountain Healthcare.

That's what Mayo CEO Denis Cortese, MD, told a reporter from NBC-affiliate KARE-11, a Minneapolis television station that recently broadcast a seven-minute feature on Intermountain Healthcare, citing our organization as an example of what's right in American healthcare. The feature can be seen online at:

• KARE-11 news segment on Intermountain Healthcare

Dr. Cortese praised Intermountain's clinical programs and our success in systematically applying best medical practices to improve clinical outcomes. He discussed the value of Intermountain's coordinated approach to care and the importance of electronic medical records and clinical information systems.

According to the report by journalist Rick Kupchella, who spent two days in Utah researching the story, at Intermountain, "They figure out what is working best. It becomes their science... The goal here was always to make patients healthier. What doctors didn't expect was that the cost would drop so much. In Utah, the cost of healthcare has grown just half as fast as it has nationally."

Kupchella interviewed Brent James, MD, Intermountain's vice president of Medical Research and executive director of the Intermountain Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research. Dr. James said, "More and more people are coming to understand that the key issue is controlling the cost of care through better care."

Referring to our clinical programs and our approach to using data to continuously improve quality, Dr. James said, "It's like you suddenly just raise the light level, where the physicians involved and the nurses involved can see what's happening.

"Compared to what it was 10 years ago, people who would have died are not dying. People who would have lived in pain are not living in pain. That's the best thing. The second thing is, at Intermountain at least, we've extracted literally hundreds of millions of dollars out of the cost of care."

The report from the NBC affiliate is the latest in a number of media stories featuring Intermountain as a national model for healthcare delivery. Last year, Intermountain was also the subject of stories in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and other national media. Recently, a Dartmouth Medical School study found that Medicare spending could be reduced by a third-while improving quality-if the nation provided healthcare the way it's provided in the greater Salt Lake City area. That study specifically cited Intermountain Healthcare, along with the Mayo Clinic, as organizations that provide high quality, highly efficient care.