Nationwide, innovative value-based contracts are demonstrating success among formerly siloed parties across the healthcare industry, including health systems, payers, and life science companies. At this year’s AMCP Managed Care and Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting in Boston, TKG’s Senior VP of Business Development, Merissa Oliver, highlighted this phenomenon while leading the “Real-world initiatives from inside the health care system – How your customers are driving change” panel as part of the conference’s Corporate Training Program. Participating panelists included the following health system and pharmacy experts:
- Edward C. Allie, PharmD, BCPS, DPLA, Senior Manager of Pharmacy and Wellness, Steward Health Care Network
- Amanda Brummel, PharmD, BCACP, Director, Clinical Ambulatory Pharmacy Services, Fairview Health System
- Jeffrey Dunn, PharmD, MBA, Vice President, Clinical Strategy and Programs and Industry Relations, MagellanRx
- Greg Low, RPh, PhD, Program Director, MGPO Pharmacy Quality & Utilization Program, Performance Analysis & Improvement, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Eric Newman, MD, Director of Quality and Innovation, Medicine Institute, Geisinger
The highly engaged audience included pharmaceutical marketing executives from global corporations, as well as smaller life science companies. Each discussion focused on identifying best practices in establishing novel partnerships among healthcare industry stakeholders to transform and enhance patient care.
Keep it Simple: Creating a Culture of Success
Throughout the course of the discussion, panelists revealed critical success factors for long-standing, fruitful partnerships that address areas of shared priority among stakeholders. Key themes that appeared across the five presentation topics included:
Establish Trust, Flexibility, and Transparency: The number one factor in making inter-industry partnerships work. Each entity must be transparent about their goals and flexible and receptive to the needs of their partners to guarantee cooperation and mutual understanding.
Think Proactively: Essential to remain a decisive partner amidst a consolidating healthcare landscape. All stakeholders must be agile and quick on their feet, rather than simply reactive to shifting industry and consumer demands.
Ask Questions: Even the health system and pharmacy experts on the panel ask questions—in fact, they do so all the time. In such a dynamic, complex industry, confusion and concern are universally experienced, and fostering an environment where lack of clarity can be voiced is essential in establishing a streamlined partnership.
Provide Insightful Strategies and Solutions: Instead of simply raising a complaint, always bring a cogent idea to the table that will potentially resolve the issue at hand.
Execute Flawlessly: Mistakes are inevitable—and an important way to learn—but many well designed strategies fail purely due to poor execution. Attention to detail in a project’s execution is a major factor in assuring all parties that a partnership in place is worthwhile, let alone successful.
Establish Consensus: In addition to more effective and efficient operations, organization based around consensus and accord yields greater trust among health system, payer, and life science partners, bringing all stakeholders to the table in an equitable way.
Consult Internal Experts: Thought leaders and experts among partnering organizations should always be consulted to make sure the proposed solution matches the institution’s needs. Internal experts know their patient and consumer populations best, therefore their buy-in is essential for the success of a project.
Start small, fail, learn, and try again: An empirical approach to problem-solving is the only real way to learn! “Failures” inform how to best move forward with a partnership and plan for future initiatives.
Measure What You Do: Metrics are crucial to establish and continuously fine-tune goals within a partnership, as well as ascertain a program’s successes and areas for improvement before jumping into future collaborative projects.
Make it Fun: Health care is serious business, of course, but maintaining a sense of positivity and fun is one of the best ways to establish a good rapport among key players.
How Life Science Companies Can Promote Value:
Life science attendees left the panel inspired by a greater understanding of how to execute successful collaboration with health system and payer partners. In addition to cultural strategies for success, the health system and pharmacy panelists also articulated the areas of shared priority they have with the life science industry. Examples of initiatives in which health systems and payers would strongly encourage life science partnership include:
- Patient Engagement
- Patient Identification
- Train the Trainer Initiatives
- EMR Integration
- Establishing benchmark performance standards
- New Drugs, Pipeline Development, Rebate/Contracting
- Research Collaboration
- Identifying and selecting preferred medications
- Quality Measure Improvement Programs
- Provider Engagement
In promoting value through these patient- and provider-centric initiatives, life science leaders need to remember the number one rule of thumb for successful partnerships: establish trust, flexibility, and transparency. In our next post, TKG will provide a full summary report of our Managed Markets Insights Advisory Panel, held in conjunction with the AMCP Annual Meeting and led by payer and pharmacy experts who explored similar topics on best practices in value-based partnerships.