Intermountain Healthcare Promotes Living Well in a Value-Based World—Licensees Not There Yet
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
In July 2010, Strategic Health Care Marketing covered a story about Intermountain Healthcare’s innovative and successful childhood obesity campaign, “LiVe.” Since then, the Salt Lake City-based system of 22 hospitals, more than 185 clinics, and a health plan has relaunched the campaign, renaming it “LiVe Well” and expanding it into an all-embracing program to address wellness and prevention for its entire population. “With health reform coming on and the push to move to a value-based reimbursement system, wellness and prevention become much more important,” points out Terry Behunin, assistant vice president of marketing and communications at Intermountain.
The evolution of the new campaign, launched in 2012, was directly related to the passage of the Affordable Care Act and its provisions relating to the financial consequences of high hospital readmissions of Medicare patients and rewards or penalties based on the quality and efficiency of care. “We want to make sure that people don’t return to the hospital,” says Behunin. “In fact, if we can keep them out of the hospital, all the better.”