Good afternoon, and welcome to our community health benefits discussion.
We're pleased that you're taking a little bit of time to chat with us this afternoon.
We have a good panel here for you.
Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started.
Your microphones have been muted to help reduce the background noise.
During the meeting, if you do have questions about anything
or you think of something that we should ask, go ahead and type it into the Q&A box,
which should be at the bottom of your screen.
We will answer questions at the end of the session,
and we've had a few come in prior to the meeting that we will tee up with first.
But let's go through the presentation and also just to know this session is being recorded,
and we will post it on our website by July 1st.
So again, thank you very much for joining us today.
This first slide will show you today's agenda and our panel of esteemed colleagues
who will be talking with you today about the various things that National Jewish Health does
to really help and support and be a part of the community.
We're going to start out with Dr. Michael Salem, who is our president and CEO,
and I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to him.
Thanks, Lauren.
We appreciate all of you taking the time for this important session.
National Jewish Health has been embedded in the same location in the Denver community.
For now, if you look at the upper right-hand corner of your screen, this is our 125th year here.
We were founded in 1899 as a free hospital,
which was for those homeless patients who were suffering from the last respiratory pandemic
for which there were no cures, and at that time was tuberculosis.
And if you look at the right-hand side of your screen, you'll see the first hospital building
that was built in 1892, but National Jewish didn't have any funds, so we opened in 1899,
if we could have the next slide.
And there are really three points to always keep in mind when you're thinking about National Jewish Health.
In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, you look really at our not only commitment to the community,
but to commitment to charity care.
And so National Jewish's motto, and this is on one of our 1925 buildings here on the campus,
was none may enter who can pay, none can pay who enter.
And so that notional idea that people came from around the country,
and particularly in the community, for the care of this incurable disease,
and then expanding to other disease states, both for children and adults.
And still, to this day, we see specialty patients on a first-serve basis, regardless of their insurance or not.
Second piece about National Jewish, if you look in the lower right-hand corner, you see some surgeons operating.
So back when National Jewish Health opened, there were no antibiotics for tuberculosis.
There were no antibiotics around until 1950, and they opened in 1899.
So National Jewish Health had to be a very innovative place.
And what you see is part of what they did.
They had a dairy on campus. They thought nutrition and air were important.
They took out parts of people's lungs, anything to tackle this incurable respiratory pandemic.
And then the third piece was that we found, our forebears found,
that research was an important part if we were ever going to cure any of these diseases.
So if you look in the lower left-hand corner of the slide,
you see the first research building built in 1915 that was built outside of a university campus in the country.
So three things to keep in mind about National Jewish Health are charitable mission,
our commitment to innovation, and then the understanding that research was of enormous benefit to patients in our community.
Next slide, please.
And a great number of discoveries, important discoveries,
that help the people in our communities were made and continue to be made at National Jewish Health.
For example, the molecule within us for those with severe allergic disease or reactions
that tends to be released excessively, IgE, was discovered at National Jewish Health.
We pioneered therapy for tuberculosis, which was very important.
We've all heard a lot over the last years about our immune system during this pandemic,
the COVID-19 pandemic, for which National Jewish Health made a massive, massive effort.
While our immune system is really, really good at recognizing friend and foe, bacteria, viruses,
sometimes if the immune system goes overboard, it attacks ourselves.
But in order to communicate with the different cells in the immune system, we have receptors on our cells.
One of those cells is very important in our immune system, the T cell,
which you might have heard about, that receptor was discovered here at National Jewish Health.
We have done an enormous amount of work in food allergies, severe allergies, particularly in children.
And one way to find out sort of the gold standard of finding out if there is severe allergic disease
is called the Oral Food Challenge, and that was pioneered at National Jewish Health.
We are in probably year 16 of the largest study of 10,500 patients suffering from emphysema
that we have led with the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston
and 23 other centers around the country to understand and find better ways to both diagnose early and treat that very important disease.
So the reason that I spend time on this, and you're going to hear more about this from Dr. Day,
is that the research that we do costs that we invest in that as an institution.
We gain a significant amount of grant funding from the NIH and other government agencies and foundations,
but they expect us to co-invest, co-invest with them 40 cents on the dollar of every grant dollar that's provided
in order that we are able to do the research.
So that's an important investment that National Jewish makes every single year.
Next slide, please.
And we, the folks at National Jewish have really over 125 years built
not only a collegial, collaborative, integrated atmosphere with the community, but really being the best at what we've done.
We are the leading respiratory hospital in the nation, and patients come from not only in our community,
but all around the world for care in terms of the specialty services we provide.
And the evidence in support of that notion relates to not only ranking services like U.S. News and World Report,
but also we're in the top 6% of all institutions, despite so many multi-billion dollar institutions
that you've heard about in terms of National Institutes of Health funding.
We get very, very highly rated patient experience scores at National Jewish Health, and we've been at this for 125 years.
Next slide, please.
So we are rooted in the community, as I said, but National Jewish is a place that attracts many, many people
to Denver, Colorado for care of multi-system diseases.
So about 29% of our patient revenues come from patients from out of state,
but the overwhelming majority, we serve the Colorado community.
Next slide, please.
We are a very mission-driven institution.
In fact, we are moving forward with a new 10-year plan, but we felt the mission that we've had for a long time now
to heal, discover, and educate as a preeminent healthcare institution for both children and adults is very important.
And you have to set out a vision for the institution, and we have been and will continue to be a global leader
in the diagnostic and treatment of respiratory cardiovascular and immunologic disorders.
And what we do very well here is coordinate the care of patients in terms of having more than one system that's affected,
which normally that care doesn't always get coordinated, and that's very important to us.
And at the heart of the institution is to continue to innovate, do research, and to educate both our own providers,
other providers around the country, and the public.
Next slide, please.
We are a specialty institution, and we have a lot of areas of specialty.
I won't read every single one to you, but everything in the pulmonary world, in the cardiology world,
rheumatology, gastroenterology, cancer care, critical care for the sickest patients,
and also the largest group of cystic fibrosis patients on the adult side that are in the country.
Next slide, please.
We also are dedicated to the care of children, National Jewish Health for Kids.
Again, three specialty areas, respiratory, power gene, and immunology.
And we have a lot of services there, and we try to wrap those services around children who have those chronic illnesses
with behavioral health support, because we know that it's not only the patient, the child,
but the family that can be affected by some of these chronic illnesses.
Next slide, please.
We have a lot of collaborators around town and around the country.
We have an over-50-year academic relationship with the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
We have a joint operating agreement with Intermountain Health and St. Joseph Hospital,
and also respiratory institutes, joint ventures around the country that allow us to help elevate those institutions
in terms of the care they provide and the ability for us to do research together to benefit our community.
Next slide, please.
So our community benefit profile.
We look at community benefit the way all of us look at community benefit,
with our goal of improving access to services, enhancing the public health, advancing and increasing knowledge,
and relieving or reducing a health burden. And we take that very seriously.
So by the numbers, we have a total of about 134,000 patient visits a year.
Of those, the vast majority are outpatients, so 110,000 outpatient visits.
Not on this slide, we run specialized laboratory tests for departments of public health and organizations around the country.
We employ just under 1,700 people. Our physicians practice at 20 locations.
And we have about 195 active clinical physicians, as well as a significant number of researchers on our faculty.
From a community benefit perspective,
National Jewish being an outpatient facility and being a facility that is medical, not surgical,
we tend to operate on very narrow margins, and we dedicate a lot to our mission.
So our own charity care, and as Michael said, we schedule everyone on a first-come, first-serve basis.
So we do significant Medicaid and Medicare programs. Costs us about $11.3 million above and beyond what we are reimbursed.
We are very committed to health professionals' education, and that is not just physicians.
We also train for rehab professionals. We do medical assistance, nurses, really helping everyone develop a sound education in the areas that we treat.
We are also involved in community outreach, whether that is lung cancer screening programs or other programs that benefit the community.
National Jewish operates a free K-8 school for kids in the community.
We offer free transportation to get the kids to school. Our requirement is they have a chronic illness,
and that that chronic illness puts them behind in school where they cannot receive adequate nursing care to help them thrive in school.
National Jewish Health sees patients from around the nation and the world. Many patients come from Denver and the surrounding counties. For the purposes of this assessment, we have defined our community as Denver County and four contiguous counties — Adams, Arapahoe, Jefferson and Douglas counties — in which a majority of our local patients live. As a tertiary care hospital focused on respiratory health, we have further defined our community as those who will benefit from diagnosis, treatment and prevention of respiratory disease.
