For many years, NorthBay Healthcare has been integrating “wellness” into everyday medicine. It’s been a years-long process of changing the mindset of our patients, and in some cases, our care providers. It’s not enough to “get well” after a visit to the Emergency Department or the intensive care unit or the family physician. The medical profession is more focused now than ever on having you stay well.

In 2016, our focus on wellness takes one of its most tangible steps ever when we open the doors to NorthBay HealthSpring Fitness in Vacaville. It will be one of the few medical fitness centers in California and is designed to serve a wide range of ages (teens through senior citizens), and people of all sizes and abilities. There’ll even be a Kids’ Club to keep youngsters busy while parents work out.

It’s the natural next step. We’ve focused our Center for Primary Care on keeping people out of the hospital. We’ve started programs such as Functional Medicine to incorporate non-traditional medical services into a patient’s care plan. And we’ve worked harder at having what may sound like an odd goal for a hospital owner: emptying our hospitals.

There’s no shortage of magazines that offer health tips and advice. But the Wellspring you hold in your hands is filled with information that comes from your doctors. It describes things close to home that you can do today. And it introduces HealthSpring Fitness, something completely different that no one else is providing in Solano County.

You may know that I’m one of those “early adopters” of new technology designed to change your life. That includes a fancy watch that tells me how many steps I’ve walked in a day, when it’s time to stand up and get out of my sedentary ways, and a couple hundred other data points about my health and fitness.

So you can understand my excitement about HealthSpring Fitness and the direction health care is taking.

I hope you’ll spend some time with this Wellspring to learn more about how to extend your good health, and likely extend your life.

The perfect world for us would be to practice medicine in our HealthSpring wellness center and in venues outside of the hospital. That’s our mission. We hope it will be yours, too.

Gary Passama

President and Chief Executive Officer