At the recent League Connect conference, Paul Merrild, president of Kyruus and HealthSparq, and Harry Leider, chief marketing officer at AposHealth, held a virtual League Connect session to discuss healthcare ‘coopetition.’ Both Paul and Harry are experts when it comes to working with payers and other digital health actors, including the athenahealth ecosystem and Walgreens. Their session offered valuable insight into how to evaluate potential partnerships in the healthcare space.
Increasingly, healthcare executives are finding that digital transformation requires expertise outside many businesses’ core competencies. Partnerships are a way to supplement core competency gaps and are increasing in velocity and frequency. For businesses to evolve and stay competitive, partnerships must also be made with competitors.
At the end of the day, partnerships in digital healthcare address the fact that consumers don’t want point solutions, they want help finding care. The compelling aspect of organization collaboration and partnership is delivering an integrated consumer solution. This can be a costly and risky endeavor when attempted singularly, but a game changer when organizations bring their core competencies together to complement each other.
And success hinges on engagement. Many healthcare solutions live on a promise of patient or member engagement and die by not delivering. There are countless deals generated with payers and employers to achieve high engagement that do not come to fruition. Having a partner expands the possibilities for creating several compelling value propositions that bring consumers back again and again, so engagement goes up.
How can healthcare organizations come together to deliver on the future of engagement through partnership? Gain some quick tips below and be sure to watch the full recording of the session for richer insights.
Kick off your partnership evaluation with internal reflection.
- Identify your core competency:
- What is the core competency you can do better than anyone else? Get really comfortable with who you are where you can add unique value.
- Seek out the gaps to your end goal
- By knowing who you AREN’T going to be, you can seek people that are excellent in those things. Where are you deficient to meet your end goal? What gaps do you want to fill and what is the order of priority to fill them? That is where you start to seek partners.
