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Steamboat Springs — Gov. Bill Ritter’s senior health policy adviser touted the importance of wellness initiatives and preventive care Monday in Steamboat Springs.

Joan Henneberry is executive director of the state’s Department of Health Care Policy & Financing. As Congress continues to debate national health care reform, Henneberry came to Steamboat to discuss state and national issues and their local impacts. Her visit included a morning tour of the Rollingstone Respite House and a wide-ranging afternoon discussion with local health officials. The Respite House opened in August at 1500 Pine Grove Road to provide a hospice facility and adult day services for the elderly, and a meeting place for groups such as Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide.

Sue Birch, chief executive officer of the Northwest Colorado Visiting Nurse Association, said the VNA is exploring multiple uses for the Respite House to make the facility sustainable. VNA board member Mary Brown added that the board could pursue creation of a new state licensing category for rural, mixed-use health facilities. Henneberry said that kind of creative, tailored approach is “very conducive with Gov. (Bill) Ritter’s agenda” for state health policy, noting that small, rural communities often have to “cobble together what makes sense for them.”

Henneberry did not make that statement in a negative light. Rather, throughout the day Monday she stressed that “collective caring” health systems found in rural communities — where resources are often shared and tailored to local needs and demographics — can be models for a changing national health care system that should be promoting a “culture of health” rather than “just paying the bills.”

“I think it’s going to take a fundamental shift in thinking by communities about health and wellness,” she said. “Our emotional well-being and our physical well-being are not separable.”

Along with the holistic view, Henneberry also engaged in pragmatic discussions of health care issues Monday.

About 500,000 people in Colorado receive Medicaid assistance, she said. The passage of the state’s Health Care Affordability Act this year, she said, will add about 100,000 uninsured citizens to that tally. Within the next year, she said, her department plans to provide an online application process for Medicaid benefit and children’s health insurance plans, so those eligible for Medicaid can receive care faster.

“Our goal as a state is to get from what is a 45- to 60-day process down to two weeks or less,” she said.

She also cited development of the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization, online at www.corhio.org, a health information exchange project to provide doctors with faster, more accurate access to a patient’s medical history.

“There are still way too many times where providers have to rely on patients to remember what happened to them,” Henneberry said, citing the challenges of a patient remembering multiple medications or procedures undertaken years ago.

Henneberry also cited a need for greater transparency regarding insurance rates for services and cost inconsistencies — the rates for the same service can differ at various hospitals, she said. State legislation that would create a database to compare rates across the state is planned for 2010, she said.

Henneberry said her office is closely monitoring national health care reform legislation and “scoring” proposed components for their potential affects on Colorado. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill Nov. 7, shifting focus to the U.S. Senate, which is awaiting a health care proposal for debate on the Senate floor.

Local health officials said Monday that they appreciated attention from the state level.

“It’s nice to know that there are ears,” said Dace Kramer, of the VNA.