Use Intermountain Connect Care®
Learn More.
Hearst Health, a division of Hearst, and the Jefferson College of Population Health of Thomas Jefferson University, today announced that Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare is the winner of the 2017 Hearst Health Prize. Intermountain was awarded the prize for its Mental Health Integration program, which embeds mental health screening and treatment within primary care and select specialty practices.
The Hearst Health Prize is an annual $100,000 award given in recognition of an organization's or individual's outstanding achievement in managing or improving health in the U.S.
The announcement was made by Gregory Dorn, MD, MPH, president of Hearst Health, and David B. Nash, MD, MBA, dean of the Jefferson College of Population Health, who is also one of the judges, at the 17th annual Population Health Colloquium in Philadelphia.
"The caregivers at Intermountain are grateful to receive this recognition and award," said Marc Harrison, MD, Intermountain president and CEO. "It honors our commitment to our patients, their families, and the communities we serve. It honors our caregivers with whom our patients trust to provide the highest quality, effective, and affordable care."
Approximately 43 million American adults (18 percent of the total adult population in the U.S.) have a mental illness. In 2000, Intermountain Healthcare created a Mental Health Integration program for patients that made mental health evaluation and service part of the routine care for all patients seeking care at Intermountain, with an emphasis on primary care. It utilizes a team-based approach, built upon systematic, evidence-based medicine that is collaborative and measurable, to help patients and their families manage the complexity of both mental and physical health.
More than 100,000 patients were tracked over a 10-year period to observe their outcomes and interactions. Below are statistics highlighting the impact of the program, based on this retrospective longitudinal cohort study between 2003 and 2013 comparing Team-Based Care to Traditional Practice Medicine:
Learn more about Intermountain's Mental Health Integration program: https://youtu.be/W1p_AejTF1U
"Intermountain Healthcare's Mental Health Integration program is very impressive in its focus on clinical quality, improving outcomes, enhancing the patient experience and providing value," Dorn said. "There is much to learn from Intermountain's success and one of the fundamental goals of the Hearst Health Prize is to proliferate these best practices so that other programs and patients can benefit from this work."
"Treatment and management of mental health conditions is a critical issue in the population health field and we congratulate the Intermountain Healthcare team for creating and implementing such an effective program," Nash said. "The Hearst Health Prize submissions this year covered a broad range of issues and the judges came away with new insights about the good work that is being done across the country in a variety of settings."
The Hearst Health Prize applications were evaluated by a distinguished panel of judges based on the program's population health impact or outcome, demonstrated by measurable improvement; use of evidence-based interventions and best practices to improve the quality of care; promotion of communication, collaboration and engagement; scalability and sustainability; and innovation. Intermountain Healthcare was the highest scoring in these criteria based on the judges' evaluation.
The two Hearst Health Prize finalists are (in alphabetical order):
The following organizations received Honorable Mention for their programs (in alphabetical order):
Reposted. For additional information about the Hearst Health Prize, please visit the main site at Jefferson College of Population Health.