How We Care for Your Health

As a not-for-profit organization, Providence Health Plan channels earnings back into our communities. We do so by reinvesting in our health system and improving access to high-quality health care for everyone, from health plan members to hospital patients. We place particular importance on providing care for the poor and underserved in our communities.

As a community-focused health care organization with a long history of serving people in the Northwest, we believe our approach to health care incorporates our important core values and guiding principles.

It means striving to put the individual first at all times through personalized attention and by taking into account each person's unique physical, mental, social, psychological and spiritual needs.

It means endorsing an approach to delivering health care where members, their doctors and other health care providers work together to help individuals and their families stay healthy through health education and regular health screenings.

It means encouraging the establishment of a close relationship between a person and his or her personal physician or provider. This means each patient's health history is understood and followed over time by a professional.

We believe patients and their doctors should be encouraged to work together to develop a coordinated course of care that includes specialists and a full range of health providers. That means doctors share knowledge and responsibility with their patients so the patients can fully participate in decisions about their own health.

Providence Health Plan strives to build coordinated networks of physicians, other caregivers, services and facilities to offer people a choice of caring professionals to serve their life-long needs.

It means an approach that focuses on early detection, treatment of disease, wellness and prevention. That way, more of the health care dollar is directed toward broader efforts to keep people healthy.

It means making sure that the approach to health care includes clinical, social and financial accountability.

Clinical accountability is maintained by establishing a framework for how high quality care is provided, with emphasis on early disease detection, health maintenance and treating the whole person.

Social accountability is fostered by recognizing that people are whole human beings whose lives and health are affected by their relationships with family and community. We have a duty to ensure that all people receive the health care they need.

Financial accountability is emphasized by recognizing that health care dollars are limited, and that every health care institution and provider must work for the social good by being responsible for how we use health care resources.

But our approach compels us to go one step further. As a not-for-profit organization, Providence Health Plan channels resources back into the community, not to shareholders.