Western Healthcare Alliance Bolsters Hospitals in Small Communities 

Rural communities can thrive or falter by their jobs, schools and key services such as community hospitals. So, many rural Colorado hospitals are working together to find support and strength in each other while still maintaining their community roots. Nonprofit Western Healthcare Alliance (WHA), based in Grand Junction, provides an avenue for small-town hospitals to work together to deal with challenging issues ranging from billing and collections, to cyber-attack protection, to Medicare and Medicaid compliance and reimbursements.

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The Western Healthcare Alliance was formed in 1989 by 13 rural hospitals and has grown to 31 members located mostly across smaller towns throughout central and western Colorado. The goal is for hospitals to collaborate to lower the cost of care and at the same time improve the quality of care. 

“WHA is a rural health care solution. And it’s not easy because the bane of our existence is small populations, and health care reimbursement is based on large volume,” said Garfield County resident Chris McDowell, executive director at Valley Health Alliance. “It provides a forum for hospitals to compare best practices within hospital organizations and come up with solutions and ideas that are applicable here on the Western Slope.” 

Angelina Salazar, CEO at Western Healthcare Alliance, emphasizes big-picture goals and forthcoming initiatives to promote economic sustainability of rural hospitals, but the smaller, daily issues matter, too, for staff at small hospitals.  

John Hart, CEO of the 15-bed critical access Wray Community District Hospital in Yuma County, said Western Healthcare Alliance helps with credentialing of new physicians and signing those doctors up with medical insurance companies.  

“It’s not huge, but it’s huge for us,” Hart said. “It’s easier than having our own staff do it because it’s more efficient and more quickly resolved.” 

Hart said he appreciates the variety of services that Western Healthcare Alliance provides ranging from virtual leadership training to bad debt collections. He also values the communication with fellow CEOs during peer networking events because leaders of comparable, rural hospitals “can help me because they’re more my size.” 

Western Healthcare Alliance organizes 16 peer networking groups ranging from chief nursing officers to materials management to rehabilitation. A chief medical officers peer group will start in January 2023, followed by a peer group for board of directors in 2024. 

Jim Coombs, CEO at Grand River Health in Rifle, said he values the cooperative relationships that Western Healthcare Alliance helps to foster because less duplicated and competitive services help to lower overall health-care costs. 

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Bobbie Orchard, WHA marketing and program development director, reported that alliance members saved more than $7 million in 2021 through WHA programs and services for staffing pools, lab testing, employee benefits, cyber security and event management, and a leadership academy. 

Coombs said another valuable collaboration is the sharing between regional hospitals of surgeons in specialty areas such as urology. That critical human resource is also an expensive asset, he said. 

“WHA has just opened the door to a forum where you get to know other people and hospitals so you feel a lot more comfortable to call to ask questions and collaborate,” Coombs said. “They certainly facilitated making more of those relationships than we would have on our own.” 

The success of the nonprofit alliance led to the creation of two separate for-profit entities. Healthcare Management, formed in 1992, is owned by 20 WHA members to provide collections and billing services. Community Care Alliance formed, in 2015, provides training, resources, materials and education. 

The collaborative spirit of the 33-year-old alliance trickled down to the formation of smaller, regional partnerships such as the nonprofit Valley Health Alliance serving Aspen to Parachute that helps patients “get the right care at the right time at the right place at the right price.” That process is ripe for replication for regions such as Pagosa Springs, Durango and Cortez, or Craig, Rangely and Meeker, or Gunnison, Montrose and Delta, Salazar said. 

Cara Welch, senior director of communications for the Colorado Hospital Association, said the partnership among the association, its 100-plus member hospitals and health systems, and alliances such as the WHA and the smaller Eastern Plains Healthcare Consortium is crucial to support the delivery of health care in rural Colorado.  

“Our rural hospitals are the lifeblood of their communities,” Welch said. “At a time when numerous challenges face rural health-care providers, including hospitals, we must work together to find innovative and sustainable solutions.”

 

Suzie C. Romig is a freelance journalist who has lived in Colorado since 1991. Her byline has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the state on topics ranging from small businesses to raising children to energy efficiency. She can be reached at [email protected]

Live Music: Sounds Good to Colorado Economies

Morrison’s legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre sold 505,312 tickets in 2007. That number soared to 1.3 million in 2021 and could top 1.5 million in 2022, according to Denver Arts & Venues.

Over the last five years, out-of-staters bought 42 percent of tickets to Red Rocks shows. Those people book hotel rooms, eat meals, and otherwise leave plenty of money behind in the Centennial State.

Beyond Morrison, the state plays host to more than 100 festivals with live music in a given year, with big paydays for places like Telluride and Aspen.

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“The tourism impact [of live music] is huge,” says Margaret Hunt, executive director of state arts agency Colorado Creative Industries (CCI). Young people “are more interested in experiences than products. That’s why we’ve seen such huge growth. And post-COVID, people want to gather together in a community and have shared experiences. It’s more important now than it’s ever been.”

Michael Seman, Ph.D., an assistant professor for arts management at Colorado State University, has studied the economic impact of live music for 15 years. He’s also in a rock band, Shiny Around the Edges.

Seman started researching the economic impact of music scenes in postgrad work more than a decade ago. “It was just not a subject discussed very often—the idea of music scenes being economic drivers,” he says. “My Ph.D. was looking at the Denton, Texas, music scene, comparing it to Michael Porter, the economist from Harvard, his cluster theory. I illustrate that music scenes operate just like an economic cluster, like Silicon Valley or Napa Valley.”

Seman authored a report, “Colorado’s Music Industry,” while at CU Denver, finding that live music events represent about $500 million and 5,000 jobs—not including about 8,000 musicians, managers and agents in the state as of 2016. He says the numbers were likely diminished by COVID-19, but they remain relevant as a baseline in 2022.

“Colorado and Denver are really good at hosting music festivals and shows,” Seman says. “It’s one of the few places in the United States where people will come from all over the world to see a show.”

And that requires a skilled workforce, he adds. “We have these great resources. We have people who know how to run lights, we have people who know how to run sound, we have people who know how to host a festival.

“It’s a solid industrial sector within the state and certainly in Denver,” Seman says. State and city leaders “take it very seriously, and they treat it as an industry.”

He calls the nonprofit Music District in Fort Collins a template for the industry’s future in the state. “I’m very much focused on looking at music and music scenes through the lens of economic development. If you do look at it that way, find ways to incubate music,” he says.

“How would you work with your tech community? You would say, ‘You need spaces for incubation.’ As a city, find a way to approach your all-ages, DIY music venues where so many of your artists are going to be incubated and developed, and find a way to make it sustainable.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]

TARRA: A New Way for Women to Work

TARRA women’s workspace is a new concept for connecting entrepreneurs with a community of support. Located in 9+CO—the 26-acre redevelopment of a former teaching hospital at Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard—TARRA touts a modern “work club” model. Two spaces meet women where they’re at. Members can choose from an open-plan membership space with monthly memberships starting at $70 or a traditional flex office space with offices for one to five people, starting at $525, in a brand-new five-story office block.

“This space gives women permission,” says founder Kate Bailey, 45, of a mature color palette and high-end design that was intentionally crafted to appeal to women of all ages and industries, especially female leaders and business owners transitioning to a challenging growth phase or re-entering the workplace. “Too often older voices are devalued. This is a place for all generations to come together and mentor one another.”

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Men are welcome. But TARRA was designed—down to the details of stocking female-owned house brands—to support women in the areas they continue to be underserved. “Just look at the stats,” says Bailey, who experienced roadblocks firsthand as a small business owner. Only 9% of U.S. CEOs are women. Just 1.7% of woman-owned businesses make over $1 million in gross annual revenue.

“Despite efforts, the data from the last 10 years demonstrates that this is a problem that needs a different solution,” she says.

“Men have tight professional networks, but also extensive access to informal education and resource sharing. Women don’t yet have that generational strength, but there’s so much potential to create the kind of networks that advance us all.”

And that’s what TARRA plans to tap. With 12,500 square feet to create a supportive community, women will have access to daily informal networking and formal leadership workshops; intentional events designed to teach growth-oriented business strategy; open and closed meeting and communication spaces; and a hub for anchor tenant the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce to make a meaningful impact.

Approximately a third of TARRA’s 33 office spaces were leased before construction wrapped in September; a block away, women are busily occupying the work club with comfy booths, high-top tables and an open kitchen in TARRA’s flex workspace. “We’re industry agnostic,” Bailey says. Members range from postpartum care professionals to commercial real estate to law and accounting.

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Like today’s top hospitality brands, Bailey wants TARRA to cater to boutique business needs, but also feel like a home. She says, “We don’t plan to scale to the level of WeWork, but we hope to have 20 or so TARRAs around the country to create a powerful network of professional women.”

Via Ferrata: Colorado’s Next Big Outdoor Vertical?

Via ferrata may be the biggest outdoor recreation business you’ve never heard of. Translated, “iron ways” started in the late 1800s as a secure way to climb and traverse mountainsides in the Italian Dolomites. Today, Colorado contains the largest concentration of via ferratas in North America.

Via ferratas give adventure seekers immediate access to jaw-dropping views on heart-thumping multi-hour vertical excursions. Dangling 180 feet above a raging box canyon river, as you do in routes in Ouray, via ferratas are an addictive thrill, mixing tight-roping bridges between cliff sides, scrambling up granite and sidestepping precarious rungs around rock outcroppings, all while manually clipping in and out of bolted steel safety cables.

Colorado’s via ferratas, now in double digits, sit on both public and private lands, making oversight and safety regulations an unfolding mashup of European and American standards that boggle the mind. State inspections are currently run through the Division of Oil and Public Safety, the same one that checks amusement park rides.

But the money is in the guiding, with some longtime climbing services now counting on via ferreta bookings for up to 90% of summer business. In Ouray and nearby Telluride, which installed the state’s first public via ferrata, anyone can climb. All you need is the gear—a helmet, harness and specialized EAS lanyard. And only in Ouray does a ranger check you in. Everywhere else, from installations at A-Basin ski area to the Royal Gorge, you must go with a guide.

Ouray native Logan Tyler, who owns climbing gym, gear and guide service Basecamp Ouray, just opened the state’s newest private via ferrata. “In March 2020, I had 55 cents in my bank account,” he says. “By August, revenue from just guiding the via had saved my business. The economic impact is substantial — way beyond my expectations.”

Tyler’s professionally designed and built via ferrata sits on Gold Mountain Ranch, just outside Ouray, where he struck a deal with a wealthy landowner. Twice the length of the town’s two public courses with 1,200 feet of vertical climbing and a cable bridge through an old mining site, a Gold Mountain half-day starts at $198. Getting his via ferrata through shifting state and county politics was a monumental feat. But as a pioneer in the industry, Tyler knows it’s only up from here.

As he puts it, “It’s an earned experience.”

Outdoor Retailer, We Hardly Knew You

After five short years—two plodding through the pandemic—the trade show for the country’s biggest outdoor brands is departing Denver.  The city will lose big bucks—hundreds of millions—and associated global attention as an outdoor mecca. Outdoor Retailer’s twice-a-year event stretched from downtown Colorado Convention Center booths to iconic slopes, rivers and trails for product demos.

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“We made a good-faith effort to keep the show, but also need to be good stewards of our taxpayers’ money,” says Conor Hall, director of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. “We wish them luck, but also know that the trade show model is under a lot of pressure right now.”

Outdoor Retailer is headed back to Salt Lake City where it was stationed for the two decades prior. The decision by OR’s publicly traded parent company Emerald, which puts on more than 140 trade shows worldwide, has ruffled feathers, to say the least.

Major outdoor companies like Patagonia and Colorado-headquartered The North Face have stated that they’d boycott a trade show based in a place where state leadership continues to deny public land protections, highlighted most recently in the dismantling of Bears Ears National Monument.

The exit puts Colorado squarely in a political position to tout its own track record for supporting environmental, conservation and public-access efforts — and invite major and minor outdoor players to a more inclusive exhibition for consumers and industry insiders.

“We’re thinking of it like the South by Southwest of the outdoors, with music and art for a more creative bent, plus all the brands consumers would love to see,” Hall says. “We want to bring in folks into the industry who aren’t at OR. There are kids who grew up in Colorado who’ve never been on a rock wall or in a kayak. We want to break down barriers and give them their first experience.”

Hall calls the soon-to-be-announced event an opportunity to support the state’s $9.6 billion outdoor recreation economy’s growing direct-to-consumer model, but also to showcase Colorado’s reputation as a thought leader — and a beacon for the outdoor lifestyle.

DIY Movers Hauled In and Out of Denver in 2021

Denver was the No. 21 “growth city” in the U.S. last year – at least in terms of do-it-yourself movers arriving in the Mile High City with their stuff in U-Haul trucks. Colorado ranked No. 7 among all states in 2021 for growth as measured by one-way U-Haul moves.

According to U-Haul’s annual growth index, people coming to Denver in one-way U-Haul trucks in 2021 rose 50 percent year-over-year, while departures rose 47 percent.

The Kissimmee-St. Cloud (Florida) corridor was the leading growth city of 2021, according to the index. The markets of Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina), Palm Bay-Melbourne (Florida), North Port (Florida) and Madison (Wisconsin) rounded out the top five.

Make what you will of the index. Maybe southerners, or people making the move to college towns (in the case of Madison) are just more apt than others to move themselves.

Whatever can be gleaned from the U-Haul chart, Florida landed 10 markets in the top 25 of growth cities. Texas had five cities on the list, while North Carolina, Wisconsin and California had two each.

Growth cities are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a city vs. leaving that city in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from more than 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions annually.

(Illustration by: Drew Thurston)