Project Director David Merritt and Center Founder Newt Gingrich Speak at Intermountain Health

Date: October 29, 2008

Location: Salt Lake City, UT

Center founder Newt Gingrich met with healthcare professionals, state legislators, business owners and community leaders at Intermountain Healthcare’s Healthy Dialogues lecture series in Salt Lake City, UT.

Gingrich praised Intermountain Healthcare, a system of 22 non-profit hospitals and 200 clinics in Utah and Southern Idaho, for its pioneering use of electronic medical records to support evidence-based medicine and best-practice care. The nationally recognized health system is known for collecting data through its electronic medical record system, which is then analyzed by researchers and incorporated into the clinical process, resulting in better quality care at a cost that is one-third of the national average.

Systems like Intermountain Healthcare are just one of the many organizations across the country practicing evidence-based medicine and seeing positive results. For these reasons and more, Gingrich discussed his new health policy idea—health-based health reform.

At its core, health-based health reform entails taking best practices from innovative institutions across the country that are delivering the highest quality care at the lowest cost and designing policy to encourage their widespread adoption.

Additionally, Gingrich took Q&A from the audience and addressed such as issues as tort reform, self-referral and interoperability issues among IT systems.