Alliance Blog

At this year’s spring forum, the conversation kept circling back to the same place. Workforce health strategy, whole-person care, data infrastructure, AI. Every thread led back to one question: do your employees have a real relationship with a primary care physician? For most workforces, the answer is not consistently yes. And the cost of that ...

The WHA May Forum, “Beyond the Bottom Line: Strategies for High-Value, Affordable Care,” brought together employers, health plans, physicians and health systems, and data experts for a full day of honest conversation about what is and is not working in Washington’s healthcare system. Throughout panels and keynote presentations, the issues facing employers took center stage. ...

AI came up in nearly every session at the WHA May Forum. Not as a distant possibility, but as something already reshaping how care gets delivered, how data gets used, and how employers should think about the system they’re buying into. Here’s what the forum revealed. The WHA May Forum, “Beyond the Bottom Line: Strategies ...

The employers making the most progress on health care costs are not cutting benefits. They are redesigning them. Over the past two months, we have made the case that Washington’s affordability crisis demands an upstream response, and that value means quality and cost together, not one at the expense of the other. The common thread ...

Leapfrog released its Spring 2026 Hospital Safety Grades this week, giving patients, employers, and healthcare purchasers across Washington a fresh look at how local hospitals perform on patient safety. In this latest round of grading, eight Washington hospitals earned an A on Leapfrog’s Spring 2026 Hospital Safety Grade. Twelve earned a B. Twenty earned a ...

Some Washington clinics aren’t just meeting national benchmarks for preventive care. They’re beating them by a wide margin. The Community Checkup 2026 spotlights the top-performing clinics across the state for six clinical quality measures, and the results show what’s possible when care teams stay focused on the right things. Why These Measures Matter The six ...

If you’ve spent years fine-tuning your health benefits, Dr. Ray Fabius has an important reality check: benefit design accounts for roughly 5% to 7% of total health outcomes. The rest is culture, environment, and the social conditions your employees go home to at night. Dr. Fabius, co-founder of HealthNext, joined WHA Medical Director Dr. Drew ...

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S., but coronary artery disease care loses ground long before a heart attack happens. Too often, clinicians rely on tests that send patients toward invasive procedures before they fully understand who needs them, and Washington State has already shown the cost of that approach: more ...