Today, the Aspen Daily News reports on local healthcare leaders' emphasis on maintaining healthy communities as key to reducing health care costs:
"David Ressler and Ross Brooks, CEOs of Aspen Valley Hospital and Mountain Family Health Centers*, respectively, focused on the importance of maintaining healthy communities for preventing disease and combating the escalating costs of healthcare during a presentation Wednesday on the healthcare landscape."
Regarding the cost of healthcare, Ressler and Brooks discussed two major shifts in medicine. The first is the importance of maintaining healthy communities. “Taking care of our primary care needs, our behavioral health needs, our dental needs upfront so that we don’t need expensive services later in life — I think that’s the major driver of cost in our system,” Brooks said, explaining that it is much less expensive to prevent disease than to treat it.
*Mountain Family Health Centers is a grantee of the SMILES Dental Project
