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-: How does the relationship with Optum, the partnership,
help keep care local for Boulder?
-: There's no greater example than this past year.
And we began having a conversation about this,
I guess about half a year prior to the pandemic hitting,
you know, really.
And then all of a sudden
everybody's world was turned upside down
last February, March in particular.
In fact, I was meeting with Optum partners
at the time when I think we all remember it hitting,
sort of March 12th or March 13th.
I was like, "I gotta get home."
Everybody scattered.
And at that time, we had to decide,
do we move forward with this partnership?
I mean, we have a pandemic to deal with.
We have a community to care for.
And we felt like, if anything,
this is an emphasis that we have to do this,
and we have to do it now.
So we managed to work through the deal last summer,
and then we're coming up on our one year anniversary,
but doing that at the same time.
Having said that,
putting things in place and having the support
of whether it be the actuarials,
or the prognosticators, or Advisory Board,
our ability to navigate this past year was greatly enhanced
just through this partnership.
And it wasn't something
that was part of the contractual obligation,
but it was more of an example of
the trust we built early on,
the commitment that we're both
going to see each other succeed,
and our alignment in our cultures.
And this is carried forward in a number of ways.
Our leaders are integrated.
And so it isn't an outsource model,
even though we've rebadged employees.
The Optum leaders are frankly mostly our prior employees
that still remain boots on the ground in our facility,
just wearing a badge that has two logos on it
instead of one.
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