Making Healthcare Partnerships Work

Jeff Weiss

Whether engaging in affiliations, alliances, joint ventures, or collaborations with new organizations one is integrating into their system of care, it can be extremely difficult to make partnerships work. In fact, more than half fail to deliver the targeted value and expected benefits. While failure rates are disturbing, the good news is that there are identifiable practices which when adapted by organizations, their success rates goes up dramatically. Based on over 25 years of experience actively helping clients enable, manage, measure, and over time adjust their partnerships, and drawing on his HBR article, “Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work,” Jeff Weiss will share a set of proven practices for: 

  • Ensuring real alignment about, and collective understanding of, the purpose and goals of the alliance
  • Putting into place a set of common methods for joint planning, decision-making, and conflict management
  • Developing a joint governance structure that provides leadership, not just oversight
  • Defining and making effective use of joint metrics for assessing strategic, financial, operational, and relational performance
  • Equipping those involved in managing the alliance with the strategies and skills to have tough conversations, manage and leverage differences, jointly solve problems, and strategically adapt and grow the scope of the relationship