How to Establish an Industry Collaboration Team to Pursue Industrywide Goals
Collaborating with competitors and other stakeholders through channels like an industry collaboration team is a challenge in healthcare, but it is a key way to secure lasting change.
Source: Getty Images
- Partnership in the healthcare industry can be fraught due to competing interests and competition within segments of the industry, but when a healthcare organization creates internal industry collaboration team it can enable progress.
California’s diversity is one of its greatest challenges but it is also one of the state’s greatest strengths, Joe Castiglione, principal program manager of Industry Initiatives at Blue Shield of California (Blue Shield), told Healthcare Strategies.
Listen to the full podcast to hear more details. And don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
The state has a diverse range of players in the market and a fairly distributed market power, according to Castiglione, although the provider market has been growing increasingly concentrated.
Like the healthcare system at large, there are significant shifts that need to occur in California in order to improve access to care and quality of care. But with such diversity in stakeholders, alignment is a prerequisite for any lasting change to take place.
“The industry is rife with perverse incentives, right, industry misalignment, fragmentation, unhealthy competition. All of these things are a direct result of a lack of collaboration, a lack of partnership among all of the actors in this space,” Castiglione explained.
Blue Shield executives recognized that resolving that lack of collaboration would require dedicated, widespread effort.
“The power of any one actor alone, the leverage of any one actor alone to drive change is relatively limited,” Castiglione acknowledged. “What if we had a team that directly is dedicated to addressing these two things—industry misalignment on one side and policy movement on the other?”
Out of that question, the Industry Initiatives team was born.
The Blue Shield of California Industry Initiatives team is a handful of Blue Shield employees who are committed to addressing three priorities: data sharing, payment innovation, and social determinants of health.
Castiglione shared how the team has worked to facilitate collaboration between Blue Shield and California provider groups and other healthcare stakeholders to find lasting solutions on these priorities.
“We work with a lot of different stakeholders across the industry, and one of the biggest things we hear is, ‘I've never heard of something like this. I've never heard of a team like Industry Initiatives. Where did this come from? How did you guys get this idea? It's so novel. It's so exciting,’” Castiglione said.
“To figure out how you do that ultimately comes down to what your organization's priorities are. For us, equity was chief among them, and when you think about payment, when you think about social determinants of health, when you think about data, a lot of that comes back to equity and the ability to improve equity for our country's most vulnerable.”
