Bethany Archambault
In the complex world of health care, no single entity can provide comprehensive care across the patient journey continuum; however, many aspects of care remain siloed and lack streamlined care coordination for the patient. That’s why ecosystem partnerships are essential. By working together, health care providers, patients, payers, life science companies and other industry stakeholders can achieve better outcomes for everyone involved.
Defining partnerships in health care
Partnerships in health care are collaborations between different organizations or individuals with a shared goal of improving the patient journey, driving down cost, and creating systemic efficiencies. These partnerships can take many forms, including:
- Patient-provider partnerships: In this type of partnership, patients are actively involved in their own care, working with their providers to make decisions about their treatment.
- Community partnerships: This type of partnership involves health care providers working with community organizations to address social and environmental factors that affect health.
- Ecosystem partnerships: This type of partnership involves diverse stakeholders such as health care systems or providers, life sciences, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, payers, public health, start-ups, etc. working together towards one solution for improved patient outcomes.
At Woven Health Collective, our goal is to develop cross-industry ecosystem partnerships to eliminate health care barriers for patients and providers.
Benefits of partnerships in health care
Collaborative approaches have long proven effective and beneficial. Collaboration allows diverse perspectives and expertise to be brought together to holistically understand a problem and create a stronger, more inclusive solution. Specific to health care where the stakeholder landscape is complex, there are many benefits to partnerships including:
- Increased patient buy-in: Patients who are involved in their own care are more likely to follow treatment plans and have better health outcomes.
- Reduced costs: Partnerships can help to reduce health care costs by improving efficiency and reducing duplication of services.
- Improved quality of care: Partnerships can lead to improved quality of care by sharing expertise and resources, such as time and budgets.
- Enhanced innovation: Partnerships can foster innovation in health care by bringing together various stakeholder who can look at the issue from multiple angles, combine expertise, and create a more inclusive solution for better patient outcomes.
Real-world ecosystem partnerships in health care
At Woven, we believe that massive ecosystem problems require ecosystem solutions. The North Star is an exclusive offering to Woven Innovation Ecosystem members that provides industry leaders the opportunity to convert insights and collaboration into accelerated, transformative health care impact together (1+1=10).
The North Star goal is to create tangible opportunities to partner cross-collaboratively to make a larger impact in health care than each member could make on their own.
Participating ecosystem members joined us to refine a large subset of health care-related topics, themes, ideas, and barriers into specific opportunities aligned to each organization. Using a Refinement Funnel, the group filtered these broad topics by connecting them with public health initiatives such as Healthy People 2030 as well as input from each member on prioritized concepts of interest.
Over the course of a year, task force members participate in a series of cross-industry workshops that facilitate active dialogue between health system, life science, medical device, payer, and enabling technology partners. They receive a Demand-Driven Innovation Report on a topic of their collective choosing and tangible program and concept ideas that task force members can choose to activate in partnership with one another or other identified collaborators.
At the program conclusion, the Woven team works with task force members to activate opportunities for continued collaboration that ultimately improve patient care.
Ecosystem approach to increasing access to care through digital care delivery
For 2023, Innovation Ecosystem members voted to explore opportunities to Increase Access to Care Through Digital Health Delivery as their transformative North Star. Eleven health care leaders then joined our North Star Task Force to help refine the goal into discrete opportunities.
In its first year, the North Star Program provided incredibly powerful results for both participants and future health care outcomes. The collective power of the task force magnifies any level of progress that could be made alone in the same period of time. By the end of the North Star Program, Woven, along with the participating task force members, identified three actionable opportunities to continue developing ecosystem solutions to ecosystem problems. These continued efforts include:
- Faster access to care through prior authorization automation
- Better access to care through equitable AI initiatives
- Earlier access to care through genetic screening for cancer diagnosis
The future of health care ecosystem solutions
While ecosystem partnerships can have a significant impact on patient care, building the right partnerships is challenging and requires shared understanding of the problem, aligned incentives, and a desire to activate together.
There are several key trends that are likely to shape the future of health care partnerships:
- Greater focus on patient outcomes rather than just cost reduction
- Increased involvement of patients (end-users) within the process
- Proactive care and wellness plans versus reactive care and treatment plans
- Increased interest in involvement from traditionally non-health care focused organizations – ie, technology and retail
As the health care landscape continues to require innovative solutions, collaboration among diverse players becomes increasingly more important especially as nontraditional health care players are now stepping up and becoming major influences within the industry.
Collaboration with the right partners brings together diverse perspectives that can create a more well-rounded, innovative solutions to truly address challenges like access to care and improving patient outcomes.
Woven’s role in health care partnerships
Through our ecosystem model, members gain access to collaborative opportunities, like the North Star Program, and share unique insights to form impactful partnerships in health care.
By working together, we truly have the ability to transform the future of health care. If you’re ready to learn more about how our ecosystem can enhance your partnership potential, contact us today