Steps foster area’s role in health care, bioscience
“What we decided a few years ago is we have a tremendous amount of potential around both higher education and health care, and if we can figure out a way to capitalize on that, that really kind of represents the key to our economic future in Spokane.”
Those pre-recession words from Washington state Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane, were uttered three years ago after the Legislature approved creation of a local health sciences and services authority, an entity that would promote economic development related to biosciences while promoting public health.
The legislation didn’t specify that the authority would be in Spokane County, but that’s the way things turned out.
Appropriately so. The new authority is a perfect fit for the direction in which the community is headed, piecemeal though it may seem at times.
A higher education district. A medical school. Broad collaboration among public and private institutions of higher learning. All of these advances happen a step at a time, making it difficult at times to recognize how much progress has been made.
Sometimes that means pausing to fine-tune, which is what happened to the Health Sciences and Services Authority of Spokane County this year in the Legislature. Issues related to bonding capacity and the ability to talk confidentially about proprietary information needed attention in order to make the HSSA more efficient.
Last year, in its first full year of operation, the authority handed out two grants totaling about $900,000, one to the research-focused Institute for Systems Medicine and the other to Project Access, a voluntary network of physicians who donate services to needy residents of the community.
More grants lie ahead, thanks to a modest diversion of state sales tax money that generates more than $1.2 million a year.
The HSSA is but one of many components that will be part of Spokane’s development as a significant health care and bioscience center. But it has a critical role to play encouraging collaborative efforts that maximize the community’s resources.
Ultimately, the twin benefits of this movement will be measured in health care delivered and jobs created.
In the meantime, action must continue on multiple fronts with the participation of the medical community, state and local government, nonprofit organizations and private business. Dramatic advances will always be welcome when and if they happen, but it will require steady incremental gains to achieve that “tremendous amount of potential” described by Marr.