Thrive or crumble: Partnerships are a new area of growth
![Health system partners with a health care innovation company for an industry changing model](/content/hub5/jmh-power-partnership/_jcr_content/root/container/container/column_half_copy_cop/col1/adaptiveimage.jpg)
The power of partnerships
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.