Learning how to effectively collaborate, negotiate and, simply work together in health care takes great effort, and trust.
Bad pharma, greedy payers, abundant providers – we hear it all ! Mistrust seems to be at an all-time high as headlines are shouting out the putative villain to our broken systems. And maybe, there is truth to it. But, the real problem is that fingerpointing and singling out villains hasn’t brought us one step closer to solve our quandary in health care: a broken balance between great progress in medicine & the affordability of that progress. Will say, costs are skyrocketing, quality in care is declining and inefficiencies with pen, paper & fax machines are dominating our daily lives.
So, now what? Keep doing the same old thing?
Albert Einstein said that if you want to reach a different outcome, you should not repeat the same experiment. In other words: if we want to move the needle in health care, we need to radically adopt new ways of working.
But easier said than done if nobody is trusting anybody. Along the 5P value chain – patients receiving care, providers delivering care, pharma developing care, payers paying for care and policymakers setting the regulatory standards – we experience more hurdles & silos than collaborative behaviors & solutions. However, our biggest hurdle is that silos kill innovation. One of my former mentors taught me: you work best with people who you like; whom you trust.
One way to regain that common ground of trust is to anchor our conversations back onto our common purpose.
Starting to reflect why we came to work in health care in the first place? Likely, some of our answers will be: because we care for patients, for people, for science and for driving progress in medicine. However, the current fee-for-service system rewards volumes of services, products & procedures. And that doesn’t put the patient needs at the center. Anchoring our conversations across the ecosystem around that initial purpose helps a great deal !
Once you got clarity on that joint purpose, this is what my colleagues & I help others do with the playbook of 7 steps to multiparty collaborations. It serves as a blueprint & process to generate mutual value generation for all actors. It helps whenever interests are very far part & look irreconcilable at first sight – as they sometimes do in health care. Think about an insurer, a hospital administrator, a pharma company, the FDA, the patient, the nurse – stakeholders with interests, needs & day-job pressures that coudln’t be more different. Yet, these folks have to work together on a daily basis.
The below outline – taken from the book IT TAKES 5 TO TANGO – FROM COMPETITION TO COOPERATION IN HEALTH CARE – describes those steps. They all start with laying out each party’s interest and then lead to co-creating novel solutions (options) together. I invite the interested reader to have a look and contact us if you wish to learn more about this unique door opener.
Personally, I have seen this technique and collaborative mindset open new doors that had looked sealed for good; and this every single time we applied it. Find a like-minded partner & colleague to test it out. The results can be astonishing as it is the secret sauce to help rebuild that trust we lost.
Trust to successfully dance a #TangoForFive in health care: patients – providers – pharma – payers – policymakers !
Let’s Dance!
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