Hospital and health system leadership teams may look to partner with other organizations in an effort to gain capabilities for evolving care and payment arrangements. While many partnerships have been successfully completed in recent years, participants all too often indicate that their exploration, negotiation and integration processes could have been smoother, yielding more optimal benefits in a timelier manner.
6 essential practices
Trustees play a critical role in assuring the development of best-possible agreements that enable newly merged organizations to hit the ground running and achieve partnership goals and objectives. Two authors of this article, Barry Ostrowsky, of the former Barnabas Health System, and Stephen Jones, of the former Robert Wood Johnson Health System, did just that, combining their organizations into RWJBarnabas Health in 2016. Here are six practices the authors considered “must do’s” for forging their successful partnership:
1. Develop a shared vision with guiding principles, goals and objectives
In the early part of the decade, the New Jersey health care market experienced rapid change, with for-profit and nonprofit organizations forming partnerships within the state and across state lines.
Following independent assessments of their individual positions and directions in this changing environment, both Barnabas and RWJ identified as a strategic goal the expansion of their health care missions to more communities in the Garden State. Each envisioned a partnership with another health system as the means to more effectively invest in communities and broaden the care they provided.
Read the full article from our sister publication, Trustee, here.