Renown Health is a not-for-profit organization that continually works to meet the healthcare needs of our community regardless of the patient's ability to pay. As a not-for-profit organization, any net income we earn is re-invested in replacing and expanding services for the communities we serve, as opposed to for profit organizations that distribute earnings to individual owners and shareholders.

Our not-for-profit status brings with it certain benefits, as well as some accompanying challenges and responsibilities.

The key benefits are:

• Our exemption from most income and sales taxes and some property taxes
• Our ability to be a recipient of philanthropic donations and government grants

The primary challenge is the difficulty of raising adequate capital to fund infrastructure and keep pace with technological advancements since we can't accept private investments or sell shares of stock. And the heaviest responsibility is bearing the cost of continually improving not only the quality of care for individual patients, but also access to care for the elderly, the poor and the uninsured.

Our Focus is Long Term

Because Renown Health is a not-for-profit provider, we strive to maximize the resources available in our community. This means that we focus on prevention and treatment of patients at the appropriate most cost effective level of care. For example, we provide primary care to the low and no pay patients so they don't have to access their primary care in higher cost settings, such as the emergency room. We reach outside the walls of our facilities, rather than waiting for people to find their way in. We continually strive to find new ways to keep people healthy and ways to return them to health more quickly after injury or illness.

We are one of Nevada's largest provider of community benefits including services that are provided free of charge and/or significantly subsidized because of an individual's inability to pay. In FY2007, we provided more than $91 million in community benefit. Finally, because our communities are counting on us, we feel an obligation to look ahead, preparing ourselves, our programs and our facilities to meet the health care needs of tomorrow.

A Complex Balancing Act

These challenges and responsibilities combine to make the delivery of healthcare services a complex and delicate balancing act. This means investing resources in developing information systems that will put patient records at physicians' fingertips to help them improve clinical outcomes. It means directing the energies of hundreds of caregivers into finding and applying best practices to reduce the human and financial burden of illness. It means working with high schools and colleges to prepare more young people for careers in healthcare, to alleviate personnel shortages that otherwise will cripple our services in the decades ahead.

This future orientation also means investing in clinical research and being on the forefront of applying new medical knowledge to the prevention and treatment of disease. It means achieving a size that allows us to benefit from economies of scale, and expanding our services so that we may provide people with the right care in the right place at the right time. And it calls for investing in the renovation and construction of facilities for tomorrow, even in the face of criticism that these investments contribute to today's healthcare cost burden.

In short, being a not-for-profit healthcare organization means we strive to do what's in the long-term best interest of the people we serve, just as a doctor would for a patient. Our goal cannot be popularity or even freedom from controversy. It has to be community well-being.

Business Objectives Support Community Benefit

As a not-for-profit health care provider, Renown Health has one overriding purpose — to make a genuine difference in the many lives we touch by optimizing our patients' healthcare experience. We set a variety of business objectives to meet that purpose. These objectives fall into two broad categories: finding better ways to work, and creating better value to offer our patients, employees and communities. As we identify and achieve our specific objectives in these areas, we succeed in generating the income we need to fulfill our mission.

By achieving annual business objectives such as these, we strive to always generate enough income to accomplish our not-for-profit purpose. At the same time, we keep moving closer to fulfilling our vision of providing people with better access, better service and better results than they can get anywhere else. Working together, the people of Renown Health are continually finding better ways to provide health care. And so we come full circle from our purpose to income, and back again to the reason we exist - "Make a genuine difference for the many lives we touch by optimizing our patients' healthcare experience."