Reflecting on the Past and Welcoming New Faces
We reflected on our work so far this year and reenergized for the coming months during a staff retreat on Monday. Staff members presented TED talks – or CHED talks, as CEO Michele Lueck called them, combining CHI and TED - on everything from market trends to health disparities to how chalk art relates to health care.
At the same time, we took the opportunity to look over our core calendar, which contains our annual plan for research and publications.
You’ll notice two new faces on our staff. Joe Hanel – the former legislative reporter for the Durango Herald – has joined us as a communications specialist. He will be writing, editing and helping to design our publications. Sara Robins will begin work later this month as this year’s Colorado College Public Interest Fellow. We are excited to have them on board.
This weekend, members of the CHI team will travel to San Diego for AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting (ARM). Michele will be joined by Jeff Bontrager, Director of Research on Coverage and Access, and Amy Downs, Senior Director for Policy and Research. ARM draws more than 2,400 health service researchers, providers, key decision makers, clinicians, graduate students and research analysts.
The Colorado Health Institute will have a table at the conference, where we will have the following publications on hand to share with attendees:
- Early Lessons from Legalized Marijuana
- Sharing the Cost: A Changing Landscape
- The Colorado Eligibility Atlas: Mapping the Uninsured
- Colorado’s Primary Care Workforce: A Study of Regional Disparities
- Healthy Economy, Health Colorado
- The Colorado Health Access Survey: 20 High Level Findings and Data Supplement
- The Colorado Health Report Card
Meanwhile, Michele and Senior Analyst Rebecca Alderfer are helping to draft Colorado’s application for a State Innovation Model (SIM) grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. They are focusing on sections about transforming the state’s health care delivery system to include integrated behavioral health and primary health care and the stakeholder engagement process. Read Michele’s blog here.
Do you need an overview on the health-related legislation from this year’s session? Megan Lane, Director of Legislative Services, will provide it during our annual Legislation in Review webinar on Thursday, June 5, from noon to 1 p.m. There is still time to sign up here.
If you picked up the May/June 2014 issue of Colorado Medicine magazine, you may have noticed that the Colorado Health Institute wrote the cover story. The story – “Controlling the cost curve: Looking to the consumer” – was written by Michele and features data from the Colorado Health Access Survey to cover issues of affordability, changes in health care customers, technology and price transparency. You can read the cover story here.