Amid the clamor emanating from political circles (or is it political circus?) these days, it’s easy for healthcare leaders to become perplexed by Washington, D.C., and Sacramento.

We can easily become preoccupied with state budget cuts, federal deficit reductions and the haggling over the national debt. We can fret over what politicians will decide, and what it will mean to hospitals, physicians, and ultimately, the patients we treat.

There are important, and perhaps momentous, decisions being made by those who hold the purse strings of programs that many of our friends and family rely on to provide the care they need. In a nation and a state so fiscally challenged to stay afloat, this is an era in which we are being asked to do more with less.

A daunting task, indeed.

How we will succeed in such an undertaking makes for sleepless nights for healthcare administrators. But we will prevail, as we have done in the past when economic times took a turn for the worse. So it’s important for us on the front lines to stay grounded and stay focused on the job at hand.

We have the sacred honor of providing healthcare. You put into our hands your life, and your children’s lives. That is an awesome responsibility never neglected by any of us at NorthBay Healthcare. We continuously look for ways to improve the care we deliver. And now, we must do it with fewer resources than before.

We must be innovative. In this issue you will learn how we are creating a healthcare continuum that is accountable to furnish the best results. That means connecting primary care with hospital care and home care, leveraging our investment in electronic health records to ensure every provider knows your medical history.

The results we are seeing include a decline in hospital-acquired conditions, such as infections, and a drop in preventable readmissions. As we ramp up our patient education and our community preventive medicine initiatives, we will keep more healthy people from becoming patients in our emergency rooms and hospitals.

That will create a more healthy community supported by a durable healthcare system that enables all to, as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock would say, live long and prosper.