Dear Friends and Neighbors,
One of the great privileges of leading Aspen Valley Health (AVH) is thinking not only about the care we provide today, but also about what this community will need from its health system five, ten and even twenty years from now. Earlier this month, our Board of Directors and executive leadership team spent a day together discussing exactly that. We talked about the healthcare environment around us, the changing needs of the Roaring Fork Valley and the choices we need to make now to ensure that AVH remains strong for generations to come.
We began with several objectives that have guided our work: an extraordinary patient experience; outstanding clinical and organizational quality; financial sustainability; being an employer of choice; and an unprecedented level of engagement with our community. But underneath all of those objectives is something even more fundamental: Aspen Valley Health is here for this community.
That sounds simple, but it has important implications. As a community hospital, we provide services because our community needs them—not simply because they are profitable. Some services generate financial resources that help sustain AVH. Others may never do so but are nonetheless essential to the health and well-being of the people who live here. Our responsibility is to balance those realities thoughtfully so that we can continue providing both.
That leads directly to another important part of the AVH story: we are independent by choice. Across the country, independent rural and community hospitals are increasingly rare. At our retreat, our Board was very clear that maintaining AVH's independence remains a central strategic priority. This is important because independence means decisions about healthcare in this valley are made here. It allows us to decide which services our community needs, where we should invest, whom we should partner with and what kind of organization we want AVH to be. We can collaborate with outstanding organizations elsewhere—and we do—without surrendering local governance or our responsibility to this community.
But independence is not free. It requires excellent care, strong leadership, careful management of expenses, thoughtful growth and the financial strength to invest in the future. It also requires the continued support of the community we serve.
Our Board encouraged us not simply to preserve what AVH is today, but to prepare ambitiously for what our community will need tomorrow. The direction was clear: change should never be pursued simply for the sake of change. It should strengthen AVH's stability, independence and ability to serve our community.
One important part of that work is providing more care closer to home. We are looking carefully at how to strengthen primary care, expand women's health, and add specialty services where the data demonstrates a genuine community need. We are also studying how and where care should be delivered throughout the valley so that accessing AVH is increasingly convenient and connected.
Our goal is not to offer every conceivable medical service. No community hospital can or should. Our goal is to identify the care that makes sense to provide locally—and to provide it exceptionally well—so that fewer patients need to leave the valley for care that can safely and effectively be delivered here.
There is another dimension to our future that I find particularly exciting. Being a rural hospital does not mean being behind or offering a lower level of service or quality of care. AVH has made significant investments in technology and infrastructure, particularly through Epic, our electronic health record. We are now building upon that foundation with digital health and carefully selected uses of artificial intelligence that can improve care, communication and the experience of our patients and clinicians. Our approach will be deliberate: technology should solve a real problem, improve care or make healthcare easier to navigate—not simply be adopted because it is new.
We are also sharing a selection of these capabilities with other rural hospitals through Epic Community Connect. There is something especially fitting about one independent rural hospital helping another remain independent. That work has the potential not only to strengthen AVH financially, but also to demonstrate a new model of collaboration among rural healthcare organizations—one based on partnership rather than acquisition.
All of these pieces are connected. Financial strength protects our independence. Independence preserves local decision-making. Local decision-making allows us to invest in the services our community needs. Growth and technology help make those services sustainable. And the capabilities we build here can increasingly help other rural communities remain strong and independent, as well.
That is the larger AVH story. Over the coming months, I look forward to using these letters to talk more about that story—not simply to tell you what we are doing, but to explain why we are doing it. That will include candid conversations about the economics of rural healthcare, philanthropy and community support, new services, technology, our workforce and the investments necessary to keep AVH strong.
There will be important choices ahead. Our Board has encouraged us to be ambitious while remaining thoughtful and disciplined. Through all those choices, one thing will remain constant: Aspen Valley Health exists to serve this community. We intend to make sure it can continue doing so—independently, exceptionally and close to home—for generations to come.
With gratitude,
Richard Becker, MD
Chief Executive Officer
Aspen Valley Health