Dear Members and Friends,
Today, Southern Nevada is essentially facing the same challenge it has faced for over a decade; access to quality healthcare. There are many reasons that Southern Nevada is a premier place to live and excellent healthcare services need to become one of those reasons.
At the Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition, we have been lucky to have a strong team of elite volunteers – leaders in the community and in their industries – who are dedicated to our mission of improving the quality of healthcare for the residents of Southern Nevada now and in the future.
SNMIC’s unique multidisciplinary approach to improving healthcare in southern Nevada is making a difference. Leaders from the entire spectrum of the healthcare field have the opportunity to share their issues and develop solutions together.
Over the past eight years, SNMIC has done much to be proud of. A few of our recent projects are listed below:
1. The establishment of the Southern Nevada Healthcare Industry Education, Training and Employment Project, SNMIC partnered with the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) and the Area Health Education Center of Southern Nevada (AHEC) to launch the program, which combines the workforce development experience, educational and employment resources of the three partnered organizations to provide entry-level health career training for adult, dislocated workers as well as the unemployed and underemployed persons, recipients of public assistance, low-income individuals, seniors, veterans and the disabled.
2. Establishment of a partnership with the IDO (Improving Diabetes and Obesity outcomes) program, which promotes, tracks and continually improves results of diabetes screening, prevention and control interventions for Southern Nevadans with, or at high risk for, diabetes and obesity through effective collaborations among public and private employer, payers, healthcare providers, educators and community stake holders, respecting the cultural diversity of our community.
3. SNMIC is in the process of providing funding for workplace orientation through SNMIC’s Education Task Force and Retention Task Force. Recognizing the difficulty many new nursing graduates have in finding a job in the current recession, SNMIC has been negotiating with a funding source that will pay 50 percent of the RN new grad wates to cover 90 days of their first orientation to the workplace.
While this isn’t an all-inclusive list of the many projects our task forces are working on, it highlights our efforts to improve the lives of our families, friends and co-workers by providing healthcare that makes others look at Southern Nevada as an example of what to do.
If you are interested in making a difference in the healthcare industry in Southern Nevada, I encourage you to call us at 702-267-1658 or visit www.snmic.com for more information. We would love to have you on our team.
Sincerely,
Doug Geinzer
Chairman, SNMIC
Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition – A Collaborative Effort to Improve Southern Nevada’s Health
When Doug Geinzer moved to Las Vegas in 1993, he was dismayed to discover that the quality of healthcare he had become accustomed to in Pittsburgh, PA was not available in his new hometown. As a melanoma cancer survivor, he was forced to travel outside Nevada to obtain his medical care. “When you’d ask where to go when you got sick, the answer was the airport,” he explains. Since that time, Geinzer, who is director of business development for Recruiting Nevada, vowed he would work towards improving the quality of healthcare in Nevada to ensure that future generations would not have to go out of state to be treated. “Although I continue to see out-of-state melanoma specialists, I am committed to ensuring this is only a temporary inconvenience,” he says.
In 2002 Geinzer got the chance to become proactive in improving Nevada’s healthcare when he became one of the initial founders of the Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition (SNMIC). Created as a non-partisan healthcare advocate for Southern Nevada, SNMIC brings representation from healthcare professionals, healthcare institutions and organizations, higher education, local and state governments and local chambers of commerce together in a collective voice to improve access and delivery of medical care. “It brought everybody together to share best practices,” Geinzer says.
Organizational Style
Patterned after an existing template, SNMIC uses a collaborative approach in its organizational structure with legislative, human resources and healthcare strategic alliances as three broad task forces. Human resources is further divided into recruitment, retention and education task forces and the chairs of all the various task forces are referred to as champions. The organization has successfully attracted highly qualified people who bring a wealth of expertise as well as their passion to positions within this structure. In addition, the group is headed by a board of directors composed of around 20 community leaders who represent an eclectic variety of institutions in both the public and private sector.
In just a few short years since its inception, SNMIC has grown from a fledgling organization, kicked off by a small number of passionate volunteers, to a 600-plus member coalition that has helped bring higher quality and more efficient healthcare to Southern Nevada along with saving millions of healthcare dollars. Over the years, Geinzer has grown with the organization, bringing his expertise in human resources to the recruitment task force and is now serving as chairman of the organization’s board of directors. In the early years, SNMIC operated as a loosely structured group with members almost passing the hat when funding was needed, according to Geinzer. The coalition has recently grown up, however, by formally establishing itself as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
Although its success may seem almost meteoric to some, it hasn’t come easy. “The initial challenge was getting all of the players to play friendly,” Geinzer explains. “They compete so fiercely in the marketplace. It took two to three years before we all started playing friendly.” Members of the coalition learned to cooperate through tenacity and by staying true to the mission of the organization, according to Geinzer. Over the years they have learned to put personal differences aside and work for the common good. “We have such a strong vision that we only pick goals that are specific to the community at large,” he says. “Everything that we do is in the best interest of the Southern Nevada healthcare community.”
Legislative Task Force
As co-champions of the legislative task force, Charles Perry and Ann Lynch bring impressive credentials to their volunteer commitments. Perry has legislative experience as a former Nevada state assemblyman and is currently president and CEO of the Nevada Health Care Association (NHCA), which represents skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities in Nevada.
A healthcare activist for more than three decades, Lynch has also worked at various levels of government and is a former president of the national PTA. Lynch has decades of lobbying experience in Carson City.
“The concept of SNMIC was exciting to me from the initial meetings,” Perry explains. “In my opinion, getting the medical community together in one structure has positive implications for the entire Las Vegas Valley and I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to be a participant.”
Serving as a collective voice to rally the community, the legislative task force works to influence the outcomes of bills and initiatives along with endorsing political candidates who share SNMIC’s values. “Our task force has had growing success in the Nevada and federal legislative bodies,” Lynch says. “Our candidate endorsements have proven to be very effective and we were successful during the last Nevada legislative session in assisting in reaching the legislative goals of the organization.”
To get their messages across, SNMIC members actively participate in the legislative process by monitoring committee meetings, hearings and sessions that are relevant to their goals. To gauge legislative concerns, the task force polls coalition members through its political action committee. The task force has also joined medical professionals to promote tort reform through Keep Our Doctors in Nevada (KODIN).
As they look to the future, both Perry and Lynch see a larger role for the legislative task force in making a difference on the healthcare legislative front. “Far too long, business and healthcare have tried to address common problems in isolation,” Lynch says. “SNMIC offers a platform for many groups to come together and address issues which before seemed insurmountable.” Perry agrees, saying they also have an obligation to educate the general public. “I want to see SNMIC become THE voice for the healthcare community and to maximize its ability to educate the public as well as the political establishment on the healthcare community’s contributions to our quality of life here in Southern Nevada,” he says.
Strategic Alliance Task Force
Linda Rubinson, practice director for Associated Pathologists, Chartered (APC), brings years of business, marketing, IT and healthcare experience to her position as champion of the strategic alliance task force. “As an entrepreneur, I identify creative new ways to approach issues and opportunities and am willing to guide these to bring success to SNMIC,” she explains. With its mission to bring education, networking and support opportunities to healthcare organizations, the task force not only has a broad reach into the community at large, but has ambitiously taken on several specific initiatives.
Through the strategic alliance task force, SNMIC has partnered with Nevada Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (NV HIMSS) and Medical Group Management Association Nevada (MGMA) to educate the healthcare community about Electronic Health Records (EHR). In placing medical records online, EHR allows more efficient and reliable access to patient information for participating healthcare providers. The collaboration conducts seminars to inform medical professionals about the value of EHR (ehrnevada.com) and is encouraged by its early successes.
“When we began, there was a three percent adoption rate of EHRs in our practices. Today we have a 20 percent rate, and growing,” Rubinson says. In another collaboration, SNMIC has joined around 150 other participants in the improving diabetes and obesity outcomes group (iDo). iDo has developed surveys and established groups to track and report interventions to improve health outcomes for Nevadans with diabetes and obesity.
As Rubinson looks back over her three-year association with SNMIC, she expresses satisfaction over the many connections that have been made and the strong organization that has been built. “My wish is for SNMIC to become a leading voice and activist for quality, accessible, leading-edge healthcare services,” she says.
Recruitment Task Force
Ron Winkler, Sunrise Healthcare’s (HCA) Division Director Recruitment/Retention, takes his role as co-champion of the recruitment task force so seriously that he’s even willing to hit the road as an Elvis look-alike to recruit nurses to Nevada. In response to the state’s nursing shortage, SNMIC routinely sends representatives (such as Winkler and Geinzer) to out-of-state healthcare conferences. “Doug (Geinzer) and I dressed as Elvis look-alikes one year to support Las Vegas and the city’s popular attractions,” Winkler recalls. “We decided to have our photo with as many nurses [as possible] that day and we ensured that each person received a photo from the event.” As an illustration of how the various SNMIC members have learned to work together over the years, recruiting costs have been cut from around $50,000 to $10,000 per show as individual hospitals gave up the idea of each having a booth in favor of one location for SNMIC, according to Geinzer. In addition to person-to-person recruiting, the task force collaborates with non-healthcare industries to recruit and is researching the development of a RN graduate workplace transition program.
The challenge for the task force is to continue filling open positions in local hospitals while unemployment remains high and the economy struggles. “Las Vegas may bring opportunity to a healthcare professional, but how does that spouse or significant other capture a job and support the duel income family of today?” Winkler asks. As he looks to the future, Winkler is confident that SMNIC will serve as a template for other cities that have similar goals and beliefs. “We are breaking ground in areas where competitors never dreamed of being, working side-by-side with a common goal in supporting the community we live in,” he says.
Retention Task Force
As a masters prepared nurse who has worked in Canada and Saudi Arabia as well as the U.S., Katherine Cylke, RN, MSN, a nursing instructor with Kaplan College and the College of Southern Nevada and co-champion of the retention task force, has experienced the challenge of nursing shortages from a number of vantage points. “I want to influence leaders in healthcare and education to effectively attract, and just as importantly, keep nurses at the bedside and in the nursing profession,” she explains. “For example, about six percent of newly graduated nurses never work as a nurse. Another six percent leave the profession after the first year of work.”
The retention task force has provided research and assisted healthcare partners in the community to develop best practices in the workplace. In an effort to encourage cooperation rather than competition, SNMIC has discouraged hospitals from recruiting nurses from each other, according to Geizner. Job hopping from one facility to another, with the promise of a signing bonus, ends up hurting the retention efforts of everyone. SNMIC is also working to bridge the gap between a paper-ready (newly graduated) nurse and a clinically ready nurse through a 90-day orientation period in a clinical simulation lab. Cylke emphasizes the importance of working together to improve retention. “We plan to continue fostering collaboration between nurse employers and nursing programs with the goal of keeping nurses in Southern Nevada. Increasing nurse retention is good for business and important to ensure access to safe healthcare for the public,” she says.
Education Task Force
As dean of the College of Health and Human Services at Touro University Nevada, Robyn Nelson brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her position as champion of the education task force. She became involved in 2006. “The education task force was shaping policy that would impact the nursing program I was over,” she says. Since then the task force has continued to push full steam ahead in its mission to inspire, mentor and inform people about educational opportunities for healthcare careers in Southern Nevada. It recently developed two brochures, “Allied Health” and “Nursing,” which target both newcomers and old timers with information about healthcare education.
The task force has also been instrumental in bringing about a change in the requirements for clinical nursing faculty in baccalaureate schools of nursing, making it easier to find qualified staff. Recognizing the difficulty many new nursing graduates have in finding a job in the current recession, the education task force (along with the retention task force) is working to provide funding for workplace orientation. “SNMIC has been negotiating with a funding source that will pay 50 percent of the RN new graduate wages to cover 90 days of their first orientation to the workplace,” Nelson says. In addition, the task force maintains a relationship with the area’s Camp Wannabeanurse program.
As she speaks to the future of healthcare in Southern Nevada, Nelson is enthusiastic about the role SNMIC will play. “Financially I would hope it would be seen as an important non-profit organization–one that donors would seek out. We have consolidated task forces, we are clarifying the goals, we are on task and target,” she says. Geinzer is equally optimistic as he envisions SNMIC in the future as a coalition of 2,000 dues paying members who represent a broad spectrum of community support. “We want to become a city that offers world class healthcare,” he says. “All the players are starting to come together.”
St. Rose Dominican Hospitals – Collaborating for Southern Nevada’s Health
Since its inception, the Southern Nevada Medical Industry Coalition (SNMIC) has had a faithful and strong supporter in St. Rose Dominican Hospitals. Rod Davis, president/CEO of St. Rose has collaborated from the very beginning of the organization to ensure that SNMIC would be both successful and have a partner in St. Rose. The hospital has worked to create programs that work with the goals SNMIC has promoted for the health and well-being of southern Nevadans.
One such measure St. Rose has adopted in conjunction with the Versant Group is the hiring of new graduates into an RN residency at the hospitals. The nurse residents are hired as full-time employees and work alongside more seasoned nurses to achieve job training and growth opportunities. With the difficulty of new nurses finding appropriate jobs in the economic downturn healthcare has seen in the last few years, such a program is more important than ever and both stimulates southern Nevada’s economy as well as provides much needed training. In addition to the residency program, SNMIC, in partnership with St. Rose, is working to raise awareness of the needs new healthcare providers face.
The hospital, has also adopted programs that focus on quality and patient safety. As a result of such programs St. Rose has been continually recognized for the quality of its care. Recently, in a Consumer ReportsTM analysis, the system’s Rose de Lima Campus was recognized as one of only two hospitals in the state that reported zero central-line bloodstream infections in a minimum of 1,000 central-line days. A central-line associated bloodstream infection involves a central-line catheter or tube that enables the rapid administration of fluids, blood or medications to critically ill patients. An infection can occur when bacteria travels down the central line and enters the bloodstream. This type of infection causes at least 30 percent of the estimated 99,000 annual hospital-infection-related deaths in the United States. The Rose de Lima campus actually had zero infections in a total of 3,735 ICU central line days, no small feat.
Partnering and helping the growth of an organization such as SNMIC that has such important and far reaching goals is no easy task, but St. Rose has helped to do just that.
Nevada Healthcare Association – Caring for Nevadans
Since it was established in 1974, the Nevada Health Care Association (NHCA) has advocated for quality healthcare in Nevada and has worked to promote a positive image for the healthcare industry. The organization’s goals include educating its members and the community, positively influencing all levels of government and being responsive to the needs of its members.
NHCA members primarily work with elderly and long-term patients. Because of their unique healthcare needs, the organization’s members have found that there can be a disconnect between the resources readily available to their facilities and their actual needs. The NHCA is working to correct that disconnect.
At its core, the NHCA is a non-profit organization of long-term care facilities and associate members who represent nearly 50 non-profit and for-profit assisted living, nursing facility and sub-acute care providers. All together, the organization’s members care for over 6,000 elderly and disabled individuals statewide and employ over 8,000 Nevadans. The NHCA works to positively influence our government and stays actively involved in working with Nevada Medicaid and the State Health Division’s Bureau of Licensure and Certification. It assists its members in dealing with those agencies and helps them to overcome any hurdles they may face so the focus can be placed on patients, where it belongs.
Charles Perry, who is now President and CEO of the association, has been closely involved with long-term care for over 40 years. His goals for the NHCA include expanding the quality and scope of care for long-term and elderly patients in Nevada while helping the institutions that provide this care meet their long- and short-term needs. The organization fills a vital role in our community by ensuring that our elderly and long-term care dependents have a compassionate, professional and quality facility they can go to in order to get the care they need.
With the exception of Alaska, Nevada has fewer nursing homes than any other state in the nation. NHCA is working hard to keep the nursing homes we do have viable and to grow this much needed sector of our healthcare industry.
Saint Mary’s Healthplans – Offering Flexibility Small Businesses Need
Well-known throughout Northern Nevada, Saint Mary’s Health Plans, a member of Catholic Healthcare West, now offers high quality medical care and a tradition of excellence to Southern Nevada small business owners. Health Suite Select, Saint Mary’s Health Plans new approach to small business healthcare, provides an array of options for companies looking for flexibility, quality and affordability in their healthcare plans.
Health Suite Select in Southern Nevada is comprised of 20 plan designs developed to seamlessly fit the needs of any group. The goal is for employers to consider what is best for their company and their employees’ needs and then tailor specific plan options to meet those needs. Customized benefit packages can be designed using any of the Health Suite Select plans at various price points. Employers with five or more covered employees can select up to five of the available plans, allowing their employees a range of options when it comes to healthcare for themselves and their families.
Health Suite Select plans offer low copayments, easy-to-understand benefits, and a qualified network of physicians. Member benefits are designed toward healthy living and identifying potential health risks early. Benefits include routine medical examinations, pre- and post-natal care, low-cost programs from Saint Mary’s Health & Wellness, and personalized case management. In addition to the coverage each plan offers, Saint Mary’s Health Plans offer supplemental prescription management and dental and vision plans.
Saint Mary’s Health Plans Southern Nevada members have access to a network of high quality providers and hospitals including, St. Rose Dominican Hospitals and all Las Vegas Valley hospitals. When it comes to healthcare, providing employees with the best options available is essential, and Saint Mary’s Health Plans is committed to helping businesses obtain quality and affordable healthcare.
Saint Mary’s Health Plans has been serving Nevadans residents with our broad range of healthcare plans and ancillary products for nearly 20 years. The company is a proud member company of Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), the eighth largest hospital system in the nation with access to more than 40 hospitals and medical centers in California, Nevada and Arizona.
