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Deborah Breen, President & CEO
Aspen Valley Hospital Foundation
While I have often stated how important Aspen Valley Hospital (AVH) is to our community, our numbers truly help to illustrate just how needed AVH is.
At the end of each year, I like to take a look at the volume of patients we managed across our network of care, and you may remember in last month’s column I defined what comprises that network of care. AVH sees patients in Aspen, Snowmass and Basalt and each service offered by AVH serves our community in an extremely impactful way.
Perhaps the most visible service is the Emergency Department. In 2018, 8,527 patients came through the doors of the ER and were treated with compassionate and expert care. Some community members have the impression that AVH simply handles basic patient intake and transfers those patients out. However, nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, AVH’s emergency medicine staff is able to not only diagnose and stabilize, but also treat 98% of the patients presenting right here at AVH.
AVH is able to deliver this high level of care because of the diverse medical staff we have access to – 75 members strong representing 25 different areas of expertise. Overall, AVH managed more than 100,000 patient encounters last year. For a 25-bed critical access hospital (CAH), this number is truly astonishing. We managed this vast patient population while still maintaining our 5-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the only CAH in Colorado to earn this highest mark; and with financial stability as evidenced by our Moody’s Baa2 rating with a “stable” outlook.
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When people ask, “Is there really a need for a hospital in Aspen?,” our community can feel very good about answering that question with a resounding “Yes!”