Leaders at NCH Healthcare System are attacking root causes and aggressively managing risk.
This article appears in the January/February 2016 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.
Allen Weiss, MD, MBA, FACP, FACR, president and CEO of NCH Healthcare System, Inc., in Naples, Florida, was seeking ways to ultimately save money—not just among sick patients, but for NCH's patient population in general.
"We got to the root causes of the chronically ill by asking why: 'Why is this obese person having chronic diabetes and heart attack?' The obvious answer is they should not have been eating the wrong foods and should have been exercising more," he points out. "All of us know what we should do, but we don't employ healthy behaviors enough."
So, Weiss tried an experiment to promote healthy behaviors among a targeted group to see if it actually improved health while lowering costs. He looked no farther than outside his office—to his own workforce.