A dominating theme in healthcare today is collaboration and partnership across all sectors of the industry in order to create a continuum of care. For the continuum of care to happen, partnerships must be struck between healthcare entities that haven’t necessarily worked much together in the past. An early April webinar addressed how such partnerships can be successfully formed.
“Integrated is the business model of the future,” declared Elaine Stephens, RN, executive vice president for home and community services at Masonic Health System of Massachusetts during Irving Levin Associates’ “Negotiating Profitable Home Health Care and Hospice Partnerships” webinar.
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Over the last 12 years, Masonic has steadily created a home- and community-based health system that provides home care, skilled care, hospice and other services to more than 200 towns in Massachusetts. Masonic’s goal has been to move from siloes to an integrated system.
“Providing integrated care and putting together a model of care that will enable different levels of care to be provided is, I think, critical for a model for the future because people are going to go and need different types of care, sometimes even simultaneously.”
Masonic has been ahead of the curve but others in the healthcare industry are beginning to catch on.
“… there’s no doubt there’s a huge movement towards home- and community-based care services,” said William Dombi, vice president for law at the National Association of Home Care and Hospice.
That movement is being spurred by a number of factors, Dombi said, including an aging population using more of the services offered by home care and hospice; the greater push by the federal government and others to moving paying for long-term care out of institutional settings to home-based settings; increasingly restrained budgets; the low capital expense needed for home care; and the home care and hospice industries are creating jobs.
Partnerships offer a way to tap the already-established skill sets of each partner and enhance revenue without financially investing too much, said Dombi. And while there is a lot of opportunity out there for partnerships, he cautioned, it’s not a completely free marketplace.
The federal government has been scrutinizing relationships between skilled nursing facilities and hospice companies, for example, and others where a facility may be in a position to influence referrals. “The antifraud laws become, definitely, a factor in determining what your business model may look like,” he said.
Legalities are just one aspect organizations must consider when contemplating partnering, said Lori Peterson, founder of Collaborative Consulting.
“Sometimes the idea of new service development and partnership can be a bit overwhelming, so I highly recommend that your organization go through some sort of process to identify what new service makes sense and is partnership and collaboration a strategy that is most appropriate for your organization,” she said.
Some of the considerations organizations need to think about, she said, include:
- understanding what the organization is trying to accomplish by partnering or collaborating
- understanding what the needs are in your organization’s market and how you can meet those needs
- determining what you want in a partner
- understanding emerging trends
- determining if your organization is ready for a partnership or collaboration.