Kudos to a healthy coalition

You might think that having three hospitals in one city — not to mention a slate of nonprofits that all go after the same pool of donors — would create a hotbed of muggy competition.

Not in Glendale, where a coalition of hospitals and service providers are teaming up in an effort to cut down on the number of patient readmissions. Now, the collaboration — spearheaded by the Glendale Healthier Community Coalition — has been singled out by the Health Services Advisory Group of California as a model for how stakeholders can work together to solve a shared problem.

The benefit to Glendale is technical assistance from the advisory group on researching the issue.

More than 20% of high-risk hospital patients in Glendale are readmitted within 30 days of being released, according to a recent report to the coalition. About 40,000 patients are discharged from local hospitals each year.

The task force created by the coalition is looking to ferret out the causes of the readmissions, which can be a drag on the local network of healthcare providers. These patients are not, as one might think, more sources of income, not when they cost the community so much more in sapped resources and in shared physical health.

So here’s to Glendale Memorial Hospital, Glendale Adventist Medical Center, Verdugo Hills Hospital and the network of nonprofits and other service providers who have rightly earned recognition for putting community over business.