As our health care organizations emerge from several difficult years, we are focused more than ever on three goals to improve the experience of our patients across our health system: 

Increase timely access to health care for our patients.

Make health care as affordable as possible.

Provide high-quality care and improve health outcomes for our patients.

Given the many shared challenges faced by rural health care organizations across the region, we will not achieve these goals overnight, nor in a single fiscal year. Nevertheless, our 2025 budgets work toward these goals on behalf of all our patients. They also represent a significant effort to control costs at a time when inflation persists in key areas like pharmaceuticals and supporting our workforce.  

Responsibly investing in the care our patients need 

As a not-for-profit health system, we are responsible for providing timely, high-quality care to our patients, while keeping cost growth to a minimum. This is crucial to limiting the financial impact on our patients and their families, who are also feeling the effects of persistent inflation.  

We continuously scrutinize all our expenses and investments to limit our budget requests. Supporting our workforce remains our largest budgetary expense, and here we continue to control costs, without compromising care or undermining our reputation as a great place to work. For example, in FY24 we reduced 130 open administrative positions across our organization, which saved approximately $70 million. In turn, we used some of these savings to increase wages and benefits and recruit and retain a strong workforce. Through our collective power as a unified health system, we have also reduced the rates we pay for temporary labor.   

Meanwhile, as an integrated health system, UVM Health Network brings together employees in administrative functions like human resources, IT, accounting and others into shared departments to serve all its health care partners in Vermont and northern New York. These shared employees reduce redundancy and reduce overall care costs.

We’re seeing significant results from this approach. Our total cost for these staff members account for only 25% of our total costs for clinical staff. This means our academic medical center is among the leanest when compared to peer academic medical centers in the Northeast.

We are proud to offer high-quality, leading-edge medicine to our region. 

Strengthening access to care is one of our primary affordability strategies. We know that by increasing access to care – especially primary, preventive and wraparound care – the health of our patients improves and thus reduces total long-term care costs. We’ve been working hard to improve physical access to care and we’re making progress.

We are working to limit the financial impact of care on our patients. 

The fact remains that the price of health care prevents some patients from receiving the care they need. We are continually seeking ways to control costs and offer resources to help our patients overcome their unique barriers to care.  

We offer several programs to help make health care more affordable to the people of our communities – programs we intend to expand in the coming years. We are also investing innovative approaches to primary and preventative care to address patients’ individual care needs, keep them as healthy as possible and out of more expensive care settings. This helps to control costs for patients and for our health system.  

• In 2023, our health and financial assistance programs helped 6,654 patients obtain vital medication and supported hundreds more to enroll in health insurance and other state and federal programs, or access other critical health resources through the team’s advocacy and support.
• Overall, these programs covered $22 million in costs last year that would have come out of our patients’ pockets for medication.
• For patients who qualify, all co-pays and costs are waived for both brand-name and generic prescriptions – totaling 76,000 prescriptions in Vermont in 2023. The team also helped hundreds more people across the region enroll in health insurance and other state and federal programs, or access other critical health resources through advocacy and support.