How Collaboration Supports Our Patients

Of Dignity Health’s five core values, Collaboration is one of the most important. This has become vital to the way health care systems operate today, since no one entity can do it alone anymore.

Indeed, across our nation, we see collaborations unheard of a few years ago. They span the gamut of disciplines, skills, and technologies to create change needed to meet the growing and necessary demands of patient-centered care. I am proud that our enterprise has long-enduring relationships with established institutions and startups. We collaborate with a growing and diverse group of innovative disrupters that envision health care solutions through their unique expertise, whether in technology, community, or academic medicine. And together, we can imagine a future with better health outcomes and efficiency.

United, we can propel each other forward, farther and faster than if we tried to go it alone. Collaboration helps each of us to think differently, tap into new information and breakthrough advances emerging practically daily, and find the complimentary skills to advance our healing ministry.

One of my favorite accountabilities is to enable bright and talented people within Dignity Health to unleash their potential. That’s why we were one of the first health organizations to recognize the need for a chief strategic innovation officer who, with our vice president of Mergers and Acquisitions, identifies entrepreneurs, academics, and other visionaries who have expertise and values that complement our own. In turn, we offer a system in which they can pilot, test, and bring to scale ideas that advance health care for everyone.

We must continue to drive forward to reduce the costs of health care, while improving patient outcomes. One of the most successful ways we do this is by reducing the friction that inhibits providers, patients, and physicians from moving forward. Too often, we see people get “stuck” in the cycle of “we’ve always done it that way.” But our collaborations lift us up, allowing creativity to flourish and push our system forward to achieve our goals as a ministry.

Consider these amazing relationships:

• A partnership with health innovator Town Hall Ventures brings hospital systems together to collaborate on innovative, entrepreneurial solutions – digital and otherwise – that specifically benefit the 75 million Americans who rely on Medicaid. Success could include interjecting more services that keep people out of the ER in a preventative way to avoid overcrowding; or addressing the rise in certain conditions, such as opioid abuse to create systems, models, and processes that are sustainable and can impact change for populations.
• A collaboration with OODA Health that will launch a pilot program to streamline payments between insurance companies and hospitals, removing the multitude of complex barriers between payors and providers.
• A partnership with the University of California San Francisco that uses our cloud-based digital platform to improve the digital patient experience with UCSF. Patients will be able to easily organize their medical visits, making scheduling appointments on their cell phone as easy as making online dinner reservations. It also helps mobile way-finding, which can be confusing on hospital campuses.
• Our ongoing work with Propeller Health and its smart, connected inhaler provides physicians with real-time data to help them determine when asthma patients are at risk for an ER visit. This innovation has reduced patient hospitalizations by 79 percent and inpatient stays related to asthma events by 82 percent. 

 And these are just a few of the benefits we have brought to our patients through our many collaborations, which also include work with Google, Apple, Intermountain Healthcare, and Kindred Healthcare. Through all this teamwork, we’re redefining health care with an eye on innovations that will make us the health system of the future.

 We must look not only within our hospitals, but also outside our walls to transform health care. Leaving no stone unturned, we must meet and exceed the needs of our communities, our teams, and most of all our patients, because they are at the very center of everything we do. If we maintain our focus, then every collaboration will bring value that far surpasses what each of us could do on our own.