Avoid Mediocrity: Turbo-Charge Performance with Strategic Partnerships

Co-authored with Jake Crampton

Market forces demand constant performance improvement and optimization of resources and assets. In today’s complex healthcare marketplace, agility, efficiency and quality are the new drivers of success. To successfully compete, healthcare systems will need to overcome their preferences for "owning" sub-optimal business functions and align with strategic partners that can deliver superior products and services.

Great strategic partnerships are built on a clear understanding of organizational strengths and weaknesses combined with a compelling strategic vision. The right strategic partner is an expert better positioned to provide a vital function in joint pursuit of a desired outcome.

Below are four key considerations for constructing a winning strategic partnership:

1. Target meaningful outcomes
Partners are mutually focused on client objectives, not transactions or processes

2. Reward for meaningful results
Compensation is incentive-based and tied to clearly-defined measures of success (e.g. reduced costs, higher sales, fewer errors)

3.Improve the partnership constantly
Partners share a real commitment to mutual learning and adaptive program evolution

4. Assess the partnership mutually
Partners are willing to engage in honest and regular program assessment (what’s working, what’s not, how to be better, new win-win opportunities, and whether the engagement should continue)

Societal expectations for improved care delivery has accelerated. This is forcing health systems to develop better care coordination, practice greater transparency, lower costs, reduce medical errors and tolerate less performance variation. To ensure viablity, providers must engage patients more meaningfully, communicate more effectively, and truly serve patient/customer interests.

Persisting to be all things to all patients under one organizational umbrella can be a recipe for mediocrity, especially in healthcare. But, the right strategic partnerships can advance care delivery and generate better care outcomes by leveraging more efficient operations that create superior value for patients and partners alike.

Read more on this topic by clicking Moving-at-the-Speed-of-Medicine.pdf.

Jake Crampton is the founder and CEO of MedSpeed, the market-leading intra-company logistics organization that is transforming healthcare transportation. By leveraging intra-company logistics, MedSpeed facilitates genuine health system integration, enabling systems to achieve greater operational efficiencies, reduce risk, better utilize scale, eliminate redundancies and centralize services. Mr. Crampton is an avid believer and presents often on how healthcare organizations can achieve systemness through physical integration to better leverage healthcare transportation as a strategic asset.