7STEPS MPC summary from your 5P Negotiation Coaches in Health Care

#4 LEGITIMACY

As a parent, we often find ourselves at the negotiation table as the neutral intermediary between children's disputes…

...questioning to gather the facts or legitimacy from each child as to what has happened, understanding their individual interests and helping them to create options to find their own mutually agreeable solution. We are playing the role of the impartial “third person”, arguably the most critical role in any negotiation.

Why?

Let’s imagine a scenario where a pharma company is meeting with a payor to negotiate the price for a new medicine. Both parties have differing views on the wider value this therapy will provide and as such assign disparate monetary value. The situation becomes blocked with at least one side becoming positional…what happens next? ?

Option one: Close the meeting and walk away… however, the most important person is the one who loses - the patient by being unable to access the medicine.

Option two: Play the role of the neutral "third person"... by taking a helicopter view of your own interests and those of the other party. Being curious in probing the facts (legitimacy) you and they presented to understand their relative importance and grounding in a common goal - ensuring accessibility to patients.

In taking the latter approach, we can ask:

Are the options on the table fair for all of the 5P stakeholders?

Fairness isn’t always about cutting the orange in half as we learned in the story of the father and his 2 sons.

It’s about finding a solution that serves the interests of each party. For example, reimbursement models whereby monetary value is capped at a number of cycles/doses per patient or a total number of patients treated, enable each of the 5P players to gain value from the new medicine. ?

Ultimately, taking an impartial and curious approach and reframing the conversation around a common goal, legitimacy and interests, your own and theirs, brings everyone closer to co-creating solutions that generate value for everyone involved.