{"id":7653,"date":"2017-01-24T22:18:02","date_gmt":"2017-01-25T05:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/?p=7653"},"modified":"2020-12-08T12:44:01","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T19:44:01","slug":"for-uch-s-new-community-relations-chief-it-s-about-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/for-uch-s-new-community-relations-chief-it-s-about-presence\/","title":{"rendered":"For UCH\u2019s new Community Relations chief, it\u2019s about \u2018presence\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><figure id=\"attachment_7654\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7654\" style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7654 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson.webp\" alt=\"Keith Peterson poses outside of University of Colorado Hospital\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson.webp 1200w, https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson-300x200.webp 300w, https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson-1024x683.webp 1024w, https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson-768x512.webp 768w, https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson-150x100.webp 150w, https:\/\/uchealth-wp-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2017\/01\/28144329\/EXT_120116-KeithPeterson-200x133.webp 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7654\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Keith Peterson, University of Colorado Hospital\u2019s \u2018new\u2019 director of Community Relations. Use same photo for the external tease.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>University of Colorado Hospital has tapped a 30-year employee to be the first director of Community Relations in the institution\u2019s 131-year history.<\/p>\n<p>While Keith Peterson is a familiar face at UCH, some may be surprised at his tenure, seeing as the man doesn\u2019t look much older than about 30 (he\u2019s 53; his firstborn son K.C. is 27). Peterson\u2019s experience positions him well to pioneer the new Community Relations role, one that he considers vital well beyond satisfying Affordable Care Act mandates. He wants to help UCHealth\u2019s academic medical center weave its vision, \u201cFrom health care to health,\u201d into the fabric of its home communities.<\/p>\n<p>Like many people, Peterson\u2019s road to his new job didn\u2019t follow a straight line. Nor did the path to UCH. The Hawaii native was six years into an undergraduate program in sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1986 when the woman who would become his wife, Michelle, told him, \u201cYou know, at some point you\u2019re going to have to leave Boulder.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Peterson really liked Boulder, but did see the need to get on with his life. He and Michelle moved to Denver, where he applied for a job as a temporary pneumatic tube operator at UCH\u2019s Ninth Avenue campus.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Not qualified<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You may be familiar with the pneumatic tube systems that whisk plastic bullets of medications and lab samples throughout UCHealth hospitals. Peterson\u2019s job had nothing to do with that. He was, decades before Epic, part of a most non-electronic health record system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI sat at a little table at a tube station in the file room,\u201d Peterson explained. \u201cThe tube arrived, and I pulled a note out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The note requested a patient\u2019s medical record. Peterson handed the note to a file clerk, who retrieved the file. This division of labor was deliberate.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was not qualified to actually pull the file,\u201d Peterson said, smiling at the memory.<\/p>\n<p>When the file clerk returned with the medical record, Peterson folded it into another pneumatic-tube pod and sent it off. Epic now handles all this at something approaching the speed of light.<\/p>\n<p>Peterson was soon promoted to full-time pneumatic tube operator, and then to file clerk, then to a job handling incomplete patient charts, and then to one ensuring that physicians had completed the Medicare attestation forms the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services required for reimbursement. All of it was quintessential back-office work.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Move to the front<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That changed when the job of supervising the information desk opened up, which Peterson took, later adding the telephone operators and patient transport to his portfolio. He had been at the hospital for 11 years by then, still hadn\u2019t graduated from college and was getting restless. That\u2019s when Donna Koepple, who ran Human Resources at the time, approached him about an initiative to revamp the UCH culture. It involved training at the Disney Institute in Orlando. She wanted to send him, but needed his commitment to stick around.<\/p>\n<p>Peterson committed, and he soon added the informal position of culture ambassador to his other duties. He remembers this happening in 1997 only because his son Koa was born that year. Otherwise, it was all a blur.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy wife used to bring Koa to the hospital so I could spend time with him because I was just here all the time,\u201d Peterson said.<\/p>\n<p>Peterson got involved in the design of the Anschutz Outpatient Pavilion, which incorporated Disney learnings. Examples included back hallways and service elevators for \u201cbackstage\u201d operations, and also the AOP parking lot, whose fan shape funnels patients to the entrance. When the building opened in 1999, Peterson became the operations manager, serving as the go-to for all things plant and equipment in Aurora (most of the hospital was still at the Ninth Avenue campus).<\/p>\n<p>With the hospital\u2019s final move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in 2007, Peterson took over Parking Operations, Environmental Services, and Volunteer Services, which included the hospital gift shops. Notably, he served as the point man in an ongoing, mind-bending parking shuffle as the campus expanded.<\/p>\n<p>By July 25, 2016, Peterson had been serving for nine years as director of Guest Relations. He was responsible for 400 employees and 250 contractors in Environmental Services (including linen, itself a $2 million-a-year endeavor). The next day, he took on his new role as the hospital\u2019s director of Community Relations.<\/p>\n<p>The switch wasn\u2019t a reach, said Jeff Thompson, UCHealth\u2019s vice president of Government and Corporate Relations, in an email. \u201cWith Keith\u2019s long-term involvement with UCH Guest Relations, with our Anschutz Medical Campus partners and with neighborhood and community outreach, he was seen as a natural fit for this new position,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p>\n<p><strong>To the community<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>UCH is an academic medical center. While it serves the community through employee volunteerism and various programs, its primary focus (besides serving as a hospital capable of handling the toughest cases across a wide range of diseases, injuries and conditions) has been educating the next generation of doctors, nurses and other medical providers and hosting clinical research. But UCH also accounts for much of the $500 million a year UCHealth hospitals provide in uncompensated and subsidized care \u2013 a major community benefit.<\/p>\n<p>Affordable Care Act mandates were a big part of the hospital\u2019s decision to put a man of Peterson\u2019s skills and experience on the community relations case full-time. The act requires that all nonprofit hospitals to show they\u2019re deserving of nonprofit tax status by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/uchealth-hospitals-eye-community-health-choose-their-targets\/\">identifying the biggest health needs of their communities every three years<\/a> and taking concrete steps to address them.<\/p>\n<p>Peterson aims to take UCH\u2019s community benefits work beyond the law\u2019s minimum requirements. His experience as one of the pioneers on the new campus in north Aurora was formative, he says. The Ninth Avenue campus was ensconced in mostly well-to-do Denver neighborhoods. Not so with the new location.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing one of the first managers out here, it was really apparent that we were in a totally different environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Peterson took steps on his own: he\u2019s already on the boards of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davarts.org\/\">Downtown Aurora Visual Arts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.visitaurora.com\/\">Visit Aurora<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aurorachamber.org\/\">Aurora Chamber of Commerce<\/a>, and Community-Campus Partnership, among other volunteer work. Now, at the helm of UCH\u2019s community-benefits efforts, he\u2019s in a position to make a much bigger impact in Aurora, across metropolitan Denver, and beyond (technically, the UCH \u201ccommunity\u201d encompasses more than 2 million people across Denver, Arapahoe and Douglas counties).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tracking and delivering<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Peterson\u2019s formal community relations work so far has focused on reaching out to understand what community benefit programs UCH already has in place, and he\u2019s implementing a system pioneered at UCHealth Northern Colorado to track and help quantify \u2013 both in terms of people helped and dollar value \u2013 existing and emerging programs. The results will play a key role in understanding where the gaps are as the hospital works to address the major community health needs identified in the recently completed, three-year UCH Community Health Needs Assessment.<\/p>\n<p>The three biggest are improving specialty care access, identifying and mitigating cardiovascular risk factors, and improving mental and behavioral health services. To improve specialty care, the focus will be on enhancing and growing UCH\u2019s e-consult and telehealth capabilities. For cardiovascular risk factors, the emphasis will be on smoking cessation and education. Improving mental and behavioral health services will be about strengthening and expanding relationships with community-based programs and developing a business case for a specialized patient treatment area in the UCH Emergency Department, he says. Peterson presented the plan to the UCH board on Nov. 15.<\/p>\n<p>While UCH has made enormous contributions to the community by providing $500 million in uncompensated care, Peterson\u2019s hope is to improve the hospital\u2019s presence on the ground. Donating money to a soup kitchen is good, he said, but ladling soup on a Saturday shows a different sort of commitment. Ultimately, he believes the most important word in community relations is \u201cpresence.\u201d Even UCHealth\u2019s $4.6 billion in overall economic impact, he said, doesn\u2019t mean much \u201cwhen you talk to people in an elevator.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat matters to them is that UCH goes down to the soup kitchen for four hours on a Saturday and dishes out soup,\u201d Peterson said. \u201cThat matters to me, and that\u2019s what this is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>University of Colorado Hospital has tapped a 30-year employee to be the first director of Community Relations in the institution\u2019s 131-year history. While Keith Peterson is a familiar face at UCH, some may be surprised at his tenure, seeing as the man doesn\u2019t look much older than about 30 (he\u2019s 53; his firstborn son K.C. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":7654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1497],"class_list":["post-7653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-uchealth-university-of-colorado-hospital"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.2 (Yoast SEO v27.2) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>For UCH\u2019s new Community Relations chief, it\u2019s about \u2018presence\u2019 - UCHealth Today<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"University of Colorado Hospital has tapped a 30-year employee to be the first director of Community Relations in the institution\u2019s 131-year history. 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