The power of partnerships

Thrive or crumble: Partnerships are a new area of growth

During a Becker’s Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting roundtable, Nick Howell, president of Optum Market Performance Partnerships, and Chris Pass, CFO of Walnut Creek, California-based John Muir Health, a not-for-profit community-based health system in the San Francisco Bay Area, discussed the successes and lessons of the first-of-its-kind partnership launched between John Muir Health and Optum.

Key insights:

• Partnerships around infrastructure functions are a new area of growth. 
• For scalable cost and performance impact in the revenue cycle and other non-clinical functions like IT, analytics and care coordination, partnering taps into scale that health systems cannot achieve by going it alone. 
• Broad leadership engagement is one of the keys to partnership success. 
• Long-term partnerships should bring innovation, not just performance improvement. 
• Cultural alignment is the most foundational success factor of a major partnership.