OPPORTUNITIES DEVELOPMENT
With more than 44 sites, 150+ primary care and specialty physicians plus mid-levels and other types of providers, IHN offers the opportunity to leverage the number of practices we have to create more opportunities - more opportunities in the business of healthcare as well as more opportunities to develop new programs, partnerships and initiatives to care for the population in each community that we serve. In other words - we're big enough to make a difference; yet small enough to care.
Some ways that we have worked together, past and present, to create these opportunities:
-
Investing in our future: Through creation of a subsidiary, Integrity Physician Ventures, LLC, we have a vehicle that allows physicians - and even administrators - to invest in capital projects at clinic sites, harnessing the size of our network to allow a growing clinic access to capital and provide others with the opportunity to invest in the future for a reasonable return on their investment with known, secured assets - a win for all.
-
Networking: Extensive networking groups (see Networking section)
-
Grant funding: Through our affiliated 501(c)3 non-profit foundation, we apply for a variety of grants each year to support care improvement initiatives in the communities we serve, often partnering with other organizations such as community hospitals or government agencies. In the past we've received health plan foundation funding for clinic staff education, received funding to offer our diabetic patients free monitors and training in their use, blood pressure monitoring equipment to place in clinic waiting rooms for patient education and use. We've also received State grants to develop a pioneering new way of helping manage the care of others - a web-based patient care management portal that we turned over to the State of Minnesota upon completion.
-
Piloting new initiatives: IHN offers other types of entities a central 'hub' for communicating with participating clinics and a vehicle for coordinating pilot projects.
-
Clinic Quality Improvement Grant Program: We have funded individual clinic quality improvement initiatives through grants, using these projects as pilots to see if they could be rolled out across the network.