CEO Roundtable: Boulder Valley health care execs grapple with challenging fiscal environment

BOULDER — Even with the COVID-10 pandemic several years in the rearview mirror, it remains difficult to get the dollars to make sense in Colorado’s health care ecosystem. 

“The real challenge (health care industry leaders) is how to stay financially viable and still provide the needed services in the community,” Boulder Community Health CEO Rob Vissers said Tuesday during BizWest’s Boulder Valley CEO Roundtable on Health Care held at BCH’s Della Cava Family Medical Pavilion.

Increasing expenses, led by skyrocketing labor costs, are being coupled with decreasing reimbursement dollars from insurance companies and more red tape from regulators, roundtable participants said.

Additionally, many former Medicaid patients have fallen out of government programs in recent years, shifting to self-paying for services, Boulder Valley Health Center CEO Savita Ginde said, reducing reimbursement predictability. 

Providers are bracing themselves for another ingredient to be added to this stew: the “gray tsunami,” a term used by Good Samaritan Medical Center president Dawn Anuszkiewicz to describe the impending wave of Baby Boomers who are reaching the age where they will need more more and different types of medical care. 

The near future could see more seniors “aging at home” rather than moving into care facilities, which changes the calculus for health care providers and patients, some of whom have begun to alter their homes to make them more suitable for receiving medical and memory care, Hover Senior Center Living Community CEO Craig Luzinski said.

Part of the challenge for health care professionals is the seemingly ever-increasing load of administrative tasks that pile up on caregivers. 

Providers too often have their “head down at their computers when they should be eyes-up at the patient,” Nextera Healthcare CEO Clint Flanagan said. 

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence look promising for helping to reduce the industry’s administrative burdens. 

Since the pandemic, mental-health care has become more of a focal point for the health care system.

There has been a market increase in suicide attempts and drug abuse in recent years “as a result of loneliness and people being isolated,” NRT Behavioral Health CEO Tom Walker said. “The need (for behavioral health care) is incredible right now.”

One of the goals for providers ought to be “remov(ing) the stigma” around mental-health struggles and folding behavioral-health service into “overall wellness care,” UCHealth Longs Peak Hospital and Broomfield Hospital president Ryan Rohman said.

Along with the spike in patients entering hospital is in crisis has been a rise in patient-on-provider violence, which is further “heightened in the behavioral health space,” Vissers said. 

While articulating a list of ongoing, entrenched and industry-wide challenges faced by the health care industry, leaders on Tuesday were hesitant to endorse radical changes to the system such as a single-payer model. Instead, many of the roundtable participants embraced the refrain of “no more regulation” and said their faith in market forces to continue to steer the industry ship remains. 

Sponsor representatives at BizWest’s Boulder Valley CEO Roundtable on Health Care included Ashley Cawthorn with Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti, Kelly Kozeliski Broughton with Plante Moran and Aaron Spear with Bank of Colorado.

This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2024 BizWest Media LLC.