SLV Health Awarded $150,000 to Improve Primary Care

San Luis Valley Health (SLV Health) recently received a $150,000 grant from the Colorado Health Foundation to implement team-based care practices that will strengthen the delivery of integrated care. The grant period began September 1, 2015 and will end August 31, 2018. The clinic’s health care team will work closely with patients to accomplish shared goals within and across settings to achieve coordinated, high-quality care that will improve health outcomes throughout the community.

Over the last decade, SLV Health has been building teams around primary care and transforming operations and culture using contemporary models of care.  Health care teams have been organized in their family practice and internal medicine practices where staff roles are cross-functional in order to meet patients’ health care needs.  This funding opportunity will help strengthen those efforts by focusing goals on engaged leadership, using data in a manner that helps advance quality improvement, updating nursing roles to support nurses working at the top of their licensure, organizing patient visits, and updating processes to improve medication management. 

“We hope to identify and re-define the roles and responsibilities of our health care delivery teams to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our health care services. This includes the role of the patient. This will allow us to increase access and our ability to meet the demand for our health care services, providing exceptional patient centered care,” said Antonio Gurule, Interim Director of Clinic Operations. 

The Colorado Health Foundation will connect SLV Health’s family practice and internal medicine practices with a technical assistance provider and provide access to a learning collaborative and practice coach. These tools will help SLV Health advance basic principles of team-based care such as shared goals, clear roles, mutual trust, measurable processes and outcomes, and effective communication.